Our Team

Black Bibliography Core Staff

Amanda Dibando Awanjo, Project Manager is a researcher, educator, and scholar currently serving as the Project Manager for the Black Bibliography Project. She completed her PhD in Critical Cultural Studies in Literature at the University of Pittsburgh in 2022. As a researcher and educator, her work examines the role of Black women and girls as crafters of radical epistemologies of Black futurity through early 20th-century children’s periodicals, comics, and letters. She has worked as an art educator and engagement liaison in museums and libraries, advocating for and implementing research and programming that connects communities of color with artistic and archival spaces. 

Mara Caelin, Metadata Librarian, is a Catalog/Metadata Librarian at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She holds a Masters in American Studies, as well as a Master of Library and Information Science, and has a special interest in linked library data. 

Tajah Ebram, Black Studies Subject Specialist Librarian, is a scholar, teacher and the Black Studies Librarian at Rutgers University New Brunswick and is the Rutgers University lead for the Black Bibliography Project. In 2020, she completed her PhD in English at  the University of Pennsylvania where she focused on 20^th century Black literary and cultural studies and  completed her dissertation— Black Urban Revolution: A Cultural History of MOVE and the Radical Everyday in West Philadelphia. She has also supported the development of digital community memory projects centering Black Philadelphia history. Tajah teaches, thinks and organizes at the intersections of Black feminisms, radicalisms, carceral studies and Black ecologies. 

Jacqueline Goldsby, Co-Director, is Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of the prizewinning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and other articles about African American literature and book history during the long century of Jim Crow segregation, from 1865-1965. In 2015, she edited the Norton Critical Edition of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. And she’s currently at work finishing Writing from the Lower Frequencies: African American Literature and Its Mid-Century Moment.

The research required to launch Writing from the Lower Frequencies led Goldsby to design and direct “Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago’s Hidden Archives.” She managed that project from 2005-10, while she taught at the University of Chicago. “Mapping the Stacks” helped transform the practice of archival recovery and description in Chicago and across the U.S, as the project became the model for the Council on Library and Information Resources’ $27.4 million grant program, “Cataloguing Hidden Collections and Archives” (2008-14).

Meredith McGill, Co-Director, is Professor of English at Rutgers University and the 2019-20 Beinecke Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities at Yale University. She is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003; 2008), a study of nineteenth-century American resistance to tight control over intellectual property. She is the editor of two collections of essays: The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), in which a number of scholars model ways of understanding nineteenth-century poetry within a transatlantic framework, and Taking Liberties with the Author (2013), a selection of essays from the English Institute that explore the persistence of the author as a shaping force in literary criticism. In addition to essays on nineteenth-century poetry and poetics, she has published widely on intellectual property, authorship, and the history of the book. She has written two essays that reflect on the place of bibliography in the contemporary disciplinary division of knowledge: “Echocriticism: Repetition and the Order of Texts” (American Literature 88:1) and “Literary History, Book History, and Media Studies” in Hester Blum, ed. Turns of Event). She served as President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth Century Americanists from 2018-2020.

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2023 Research Fellows

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2019 Research Fellows