As Alana was completing her doctoral work in Comparative Studies, she started her first job as a librarian, and she has been pursuing a career in librarianship since that time. She now works as a Research and Instruction Librarian at Amherst College, where she is the subject specialist for research in Black Studies, Classics, History, and Philosophy. In her work as an instruction librarian, she partners with faculty in these subject areas to teach inter/disciplinary research methods to undergraduates. She also works directly with students, supporting them as they navigate their research--helping them to articulate questions; find the academic and community conversations their work engages; work with archives and primary sources; move through stuck places; and build connections with other researchers. The critical, relational, and transformative pedagogies she experienced as a student and a graduate teaching associate in Comparative Studies continue to shape her teaching, in the classroom and in the library. Alana's supporting Black Studies, particularly, benefits from her experience with interdisciplinarity as a practice of articulation, translation, and of making strategic political, discursive, and creative choices around knowledge production. In her own scholarship, she has developed her dissertation into a book (Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive, Litwin Books, 2014), and has published work at the intersections of critical pedagogy and library instruction, disability justice and/in librarianship, trauma-aware student support in libraries. Alana is currently reading about and practicing relational librarianship, metaphysical detection, arts-based research, and embodied pedagogy.
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