Archives,Heritage, and Communities

Sumayya Ahmed is the Executive Director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) at the University of Chicago. She worked as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in Archives Management at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University and at the Program of Library and Information Studies at University College London-Qatar.

She earned her doctorate from the  School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she held the Educating Librarians in the Middle East for the 21st Century (ELIME-21) Fellowship from 2011- 2015.

Sumayya has published research on documentary heritage and book culture in North Africa and the Middle East, the societal provenance of historical manuscript collections, the history of archives in North Africa and the Middle East, and the place of race/racism in the field of Archives and Libraries.

Sumayya is the co-editor of the Routledge Studies in Archives Series.