Tonia Sutherland
Tonia Sutherland is Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. Sutherland holds a PhD and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in history, performance studies, and cultural studies from Hampshire College. Global in scope, Sutherland’s research focuses on the critical and liberatory in archival studies, digital studies, and science and technology studies, emphasizing the often-messy entanglements of memory, community, and technology. Sutherland, an internationally recognized expert in the study of Black archival practices, is the author of Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (University of California Press, 2023) as well as over two dozen articles and book chapters. In addition to her research and teaching, Sutherland is the Co-Director of the Community Archives Lab at UCLA, Co-Founder and Co-Director of AfterLab at the University of Washington's iSchool, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at NYU.
Teaching and Research Interests
- Archival Theory & Practice
- Black Archives & Archival Practices
- Critical Race & Digital Studies
- Critical Information Studies / Critical Data Studies
Research Center affiliations
- UCLA Community Archives Lab
- AfterLab (University of Washington iSchool)
- Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies (NYU)
Education
- PhD, Archival Studies, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 2014
- MLIS, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
- BA, History, Performance Studies, & Cultural Studies, Hampshire College, 1997
Select Publications
- Sutherland, Tonia. Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (University of California Press, October 2023).
- Sutherland, Tonia. “Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2 (2017).
- Sutherland, Tonia. “‘Making a Killing’: On Race, Ritual, and (Re)membering in Digital Culture.” Preservation, Digital Technology, and Culture 46, no. 1 (2017): 36-40.
- Tonia Sutherland and Gailyn Bopp. “The Pacific Futures of Subsea Data Centers.” New Media and Society 25, no. 2 (2023): 345-360.