Tonia Sutherland
Associate Dean for Faculty Development; Associate Professor
Tonia Sutherland is Associate Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. Sutherland holds a Ph.D. and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. 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.
Departments
Expertise
Research Centers
Education
- Ph.D., Archival Studies, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 2014
- MLIS, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
- B.A., 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.
- Zakiya Collier and Tonia Sutherland. “Witnessing, Testimony, and Transformation as Genres of Black Archival Practice.” The Black Scholar 52, no. 2 (2022): 6-14.
- Tonia Sutherland and Alyssa Purcell. “A Weapon and a Tool: Decolonizing Description and Engaging Redescription as Liberatory Archival Praxes.” International Journal of Information, Diversity, and Inclusion 5, no. 1 (2021): 60-78.
- Tonia Sutherland. “The Carceral Archive: Documentary Records, Narrative Construction, and Predictive Risk Assessment.” Cultural Analytics (2019).
- Isabel Espinal, Tonia Sutherland, and Charlotte Roh. “A Holistic Approach for Inclusive Librarianship: Decentering Whiteness in Our Profession.” Library Trends 67, no. 1 (Summer 2018): 147-162.
- Tonia Sutherland. “Reading Gesture: Katherine Dunham, the Dunham Technique, and the Vocabulary of Dance as Decolonizing Archival Praxis.” Archival Science (2019): 167-183.
- Tonia Sutherland. “Disrupting Carceral Narratives: Race, Rape, and the Archives.” Open Information Science (August 2020).