Bio
Tamara Rayan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information and holds a PhD from the University of Michigan’s School of Information. At the intersection of archival studies, cultural heritage studies, and anthropology, their research investigates the tangible and intangible preservation practices used by communities and memory institutions in response to forced displacement, settler colonialism, and repression. In particular, they examine how Palestinians and other diaspora communities make sense of cultural heritage preservation within violent conditions and how they mobilize their own epistemologies in defiant acts of resistance. Their current research project investigates how Toronto Palestinians steward family archives to preserve ties across the diaspora. They serve as a Review Editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. Their published and forthcoming work can be found in Across the Disciplines, Archival Science, Computational Humanities Research, Archivaria, and American Archivist.