Staff


Sumayya Ahmed, Ph.D., Executive Director

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Sumayya Ahmed, Ph.D

Sumayya Ahmed joined the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) and the University of Chicago Library as Executive Director of the BMRC in January, 2024. Ahmed will provide strategic leadership and operational management for the BMRC’s activities in this role.

Ahmed comes to the BMRC from Simmons University in Boston, where she worked as an Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science. As an archives educator and scholar, she taught graduate courses in Archival Studies for students pursuing the MLIS degree at Simmons and, before that, at University College London’s global campus in Doha, Qatar. Originally from Chicago, Ahmed earned her PhD in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and a BA in African American Studies and Sociology from Wesleyan University.

A member of the Society of American Archivists, Ahmed serves on the Archival Education and Research Initiative board and the Center for Maghrib Studies at Arizona State University. She is the co-editor of the Routledge Studies in Archives Series. She has published on archives in North Africa and race and equity within the library, archives, and museum sector.


Allison Sutton, Program Manager

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Allison M. Sutton, MLIS

Allison Sutton joined the BMRC in May 2020. In this role, she serves as the primary lead for the educational programming and initiatives, primarily the Archie Motley Archival Internship Program and the Summer Short-term Fellowship Program. She also works with Northwestern University's Office of Civic Engagement as a partner for the Black Metropolis Graduate Assistantship program, now in its second year. During the summer of 2022, Allison helped to pilot "Tools for Exploration & Sharing Chicago’s African American Archival Gems" a program bringing together history scholars and archivists with Chicago Public School history teachers looking to help their students understand the importance of archival collections to historical research. The program is on pause this year but will resume in the summer of 2024. Additionally, Allison is also responsible for the BMRC's principal communication tools, the monthly e-newsletter, the website, all social media activity, and the management of the daily operations for the consortium.

Before joining the BMRC, Allison enjoyed working in diverse roles within higher education. Most recently, I was a Student Success Center team member at Loyola University New Orleans. Allison spent nearly a decade as the Psychology & Social Work Subject Specialist Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Collection development, instruction, and outreach were crucial responsibilities in this role. Also actively engaged in research, Allison focused on African American library education history. The centerpiece of her work was a journal article about the Negro Teacher-Librarian Training Program, a little-known library training program in the early 20th century that had a significant impact on the diversification of the field of library education. In her last two years at the University of Illinois, Allison worked on the early phase of a newly added manuscript collection ⠀Shozō Satō Papers and a digitization project to preserve the highly sought-after "Project 500" archival records, a late 1960s program created to recruit Black students. Allison's first position in the academic library world was as a Library Associate at the Camille Stivers Shade Black Heritage Collection at Southern University Baton Rouge, LA. She was simultaneously a graduate student working on a Master’s in Library and Information Science from Louisiana State University. Allison was awarded a Spectrum Scholarship from the American Library Association during this time. She was among the first graduate students selected to receive a diversity scholarship (currently titled Kaleidoscope Scholarship Program) through the Association of Research Libraries (ARL.) Later, Allison was chosen for the ARL's Leadership & Career Development Program and continued volunteering with ARL and the ALA in presenting diversity & recruitment programming.

When not working, Allison enjoys cooking, walking, reading, watching documentaries, listening to jazz, blues, classic R&B, yacht rock, Louisiana zydeco, and connecting with family and friends.


Former Staff

Marcia Walker-McWilliams, Ph.D., Executive Director
Laurie Lee Moses, Portal Archivist
Jehoiada Calvin, Community Engagement Archivist
Andrea Jackson Gavin, Executive Director
Anita Mechler, Program Manager/Archivist
Camille Brewer, Executive Director
Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty, Archivist and Executive Director
Lisa Calahan, Lead Surveyor and Archivist for Survey Initiative
& Project Director and Archivist for Color Curtain Processing Project
Bergis Jules, Project Director and Archivist for Survey Initiative
Vera Davis, Executive Director