Engaging with
Cultural Heritage Through
Conversation and Teaching
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Dorothy Berry & Sumayya Ahmed on Archives
(Smart Museum and Black Metropolis Research Consortium)
Invited Speaker, 2026“Preserving Us: Black Archivists, Memory Work and the Call to Protect Our Histories”
(Those Who Have Must Turn Around and Give: Celebrating 40 Years of Preserving Black History and Education)
Invited Keynote Panelist, 2026“Tending to the Past: A Conversation with Smithsonian Curator Dorothy Berry”
(Lehigh University)
Invited Speaker, 2026“What are We Looking At: Massive Modes and Minimal Description”
(Fantastic Futures, AI4LAM British Library)
Keynote, 2025“How Users Imagine Archival Research: JPCA Explore”
(Centre for Data, Society, and Culture, Edinburgh Futures Institute)
Annual Lecture, 2025“Looking Back Through Opaque Glasses: What Born-Digital Archives Can Learn from Analog”
(Born-Digital Collections Archives and Memory Conference, School of Advanced Study, University College London)
Keynote, 2025“Reading a Digital Collection: The Johnson Publishing Company Archive in Process”
(Workshop in the History of Material Texts, University of Pennsylvania)
Invited Speaker, 2024“Harry Smith: Collector, Anthropologist, Artist “
(Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University)
Invited Speaker, 2024Who Owns Black Data Conference
(Johns Hopkins University)
Keynote Speaker“Keeping Whose History, For Whom: Writing the Stories Digital Preservation Tells”
(National Digital Stewardship Alliance)
Keynote,2022“Making Music Librarianship More Improvisatory”
(Music Library Association)
Plenary Speaker, 2022“Power, Resistance, and Leadership in Our Profession”
(Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, ALA)
Plenary Speaker, 2021“My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Remembering Black History in the Archives”
(Society of Georgia Archivists)
Keynote, 2020“Race, Power, and Metadata: Whose Digital History?”
(Digital Public Library of America)
Keynote, 2020“Imagining Better Futures for Archival Labor”
(Society of North Carolina Archivists Annual Meeting)
Keynote, 2020SAA Community Reflection on Black Lives and Archives
(Society of American Archivists)
Invited Speaker, 2020“Giving Voice to Archival Silences: Amplifying Black History Through Research and Technology”
(Annual African and African American Studies Lecture Series, Missouri State University)
Invited Speaker, 2018History Keepers Program
(Yale University Afro-American Cultural Center)
Invited Speaker, 2017 -
Promises and Challenges of Multivocal Research Practices Concerning Segregated Black Asylums
(Duke University)
Invited InterlocutorPerforming Archival Work
(American Society for Theatre Research)
Field Conversation Panelist, 2024
Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library
(OCLC Works in Progress)
Webinar Leader, 2021Cutting Room Floor: Editing Language in Time-Based Media Collections
(Association of Moving Image Archivists)
Webinar Co-Facilitator, 2021Centering the Margins in Digital Project Planning
(Louisiana Digital Library for Data Series)
Webinar Facilitator, 2020Conscious Editing: Enhancing Diversity and Discovery
(Sunshine State Digital Network Conscious Editing Series)
Webinar Facilitator, 2020Umbra Search African American History
(OCLC Works in Progress)
Webinar Co-Facilitator, 2017Lost in Aggregation: Towards Inclusive Metadata and Descriptive Practices in Digital Collections
(Digital Public Library of America)
Working Session Facilitator, 2017 -
“Archival Activism”
(AUC Art Collective Symposium)
Invited Panelist, 2026“Curating Black History”
Autumn Womack and Dorothy Berry
(New York State Writer’s Institute)
Invited Panelist, 2026"In Progress: Insights from the Johnson Publishing Company Archive Project"
(Society of American Archivists)
Panelist, 2024"Making Institutional Archives"
(Archives of Revolution: A Conference About How We Make the Past at the John Carter Brown Library)
Panel Chair and Invited Conference Program Committee Member, 2024“What Makes a Collector? A Conversation on Collecting Sound Recordings”
(Association for Recorded Sound Collections)
Invited Panelist, 2022“The Ethics of Collecting in the 21st Century”
(Jay I. Kislak Symposium, University of Pennsylvania)
Invited Panelist, 2021“Archiving the Invisible: Black Sonic Archives”
(Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University)
Invited Panelist, 2021"A Picture of Slavery for Youth": Creating Young Abolitionists
(Bibliographic Society of America)
Invited Roundtable Moderator, 2021“Looking at Language with New Eyes: Reparative Description in Archival Collections”
(Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts)
Invited Presenter, 2021“Self-Determined Progress and the Attucks-Gotham Publishing Company”
(Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University, Book History Seminar)
Invited Paper Presentation, 2021“Archival Silences in the Present Moment”
(Princeton Center for the Humanities)
Invited Panelist, 2020“Black Bibliography: Dorothy Porter’s ‘Early American Negro Writing’ at 75”
(Bibliographic Society of America)
Invited Panelist, 2020Archives in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Towards Discoverable Blackness
(Black Portraiture[s] V: Memory and the Archive)
Paper Presentation, 2019Designing Inclusive Information Systems: From Theory to Change
(Association for Computers and the Humanities)
Panelist, 2019“Personally Sustainable Models for Institutionally Sustainable Work”
(Digital Library Federation)
Panel Co-Chair, 2018“Take me Into the Library and Show Me Myself: Towards Authentic Accessibility in Digital Libraries”
(The Past, Present, and Future of Libraries Symposium, American Philosophical Society)
Panelist, 2018“Toward Culturally Competent Archival (Re)Description of Marginalized Histories”
(Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting)
Panelist, 2018“Paths to Discovery: Programs Bringing African American Collections to Stakeholder Communities”
(Midwest Archives Conference)
Panel Chair, 2017“Making the Invisible Visible: Activating Black History Through Digital Storytelling”
(Virginia Commonwealth University)
Panelist, 2016“An Honest Reckoning: [Digital?] Sites for Black History and Research Scholarship”
(Association for the Study of African American History and Life)
Panelist, 2016“Black Archives Now: Collaboration, Access, and Use”
(Emory University)
Panelist, 2016 -
Digital Humanities in the Classroom
(Dream Lab 2022-2024, University of Pennsylvania)
Instructor