LaVerne Gray

My research intersects LIS social justice, Black feminisms, and History & Memory, treating memory as world-building. Through narratology, bricolage, and grounded theory, I examine Black information as communal, abundant, connected, and resistant to evidentiary hierarchies.

• Newberry Library, Richard H. Brown/William Lloyd Barber Fellow, 2026-2027
• Black Metropolis Research Consortium, Short Term Summer Fellowship, 2017 & 2024
• Syracuse University Libraries Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) Faculty Fellow, 2023-2024 
• Norman Horrocks Leadership Award, Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), 2023
• Meredith Teaching Award for Early Performance, Syracuse University, 2022
• Outstanding Dissertation Award, College of Communication and Information, University of Tennessee, 2019.
• Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)Jean Tague-Sutcliffe Doctoral Poster Competition, Second Place, 2019.

Gray’s research explores how information exists, circulates, and endures within Black communities. A native of Chicago, her commitment to community, service, and collective knowledge began long before her academic career. After graduating from Wilberforce University, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa before entering librarianship, where she spent eight years as an academic librarian. Her experiences in libraries deepened her curiosity about the ways people seek, preserve, and share knowledge, ultimately leading her to pursue a PhD in information sciences at the University of Tennessee as an American Library Association Spectrum Doctoral Fellow. She comes to Illinois from Syracuse University, where she was an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies. 

Her work makes the case for a vision of information science that recognizes Black communities as producers, stewards, and interpreters of enduring knowledge rather than simply subjects of documentation. 

Gray, L. (2026). The future has a past: Information, memory, and the Black feminist hereafter. In R. Chancellor, W. Bishop, & J. Sanchez (Eds.), A critical look at information science and librarianship in a new age: Constellation of insanity. Emerald Publishing. 

Gray, L. (2025). Charlemae Hill Rollins: Out of One, Many. In Cooke, N.A. (Ed.), When they dare to be Powerful: The legacy of Black women in Librarianship. (Critical Cultural Information Studies Series). (pp. 183-192). ALA Editions/Neal Schuman. https://alastore.ala.org/lbwl. 

Duan, Y., Hemsley, J., Smith, A.O., Joh, U., Gray, L., & Khoury, C.(2024). Curating Virality: Exploring Curated Logics Within #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter/X. SOCIAL MEDIA + SOCIETY, 10(2), 20563051241242799. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241242799.

 Gray, L. & Choi, J. (2024). Veritable Miracle: Situating Black Women Librarians Networks within a Feminist Historical Paradigm. Library Trends. 72(3), 426-444. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2024.a944673. 

Gray, L., Choi, J., Crooks, S., Cook, A. (2023). Locating Black Information Lives: "Scoping" the Literature on African American Genealogical Research. In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity. iConference 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13971. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_38.  

Winberry, J., & Gray, L. (2022). From "Mesearch” to “Wesearch": The Role of Community in Developing Identity-Centric Research. ALISE Annual Conference, October 24- 26, 2022 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference. https://doi.org/10.21900/j.alise.2022.1033. 

Gray, L. (2022). Information Abundance and Deficit: Revisiting Elfreda Chatman’s inquiry of marginal spaces and populations. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. Vol. 3. https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/151/105.

 Gray, L. (2022). "Naomi Willie Pollard Dobson: A Pioneering Black Librarian." Libraries, Culture, History, & Society: Special Issue on African American Women Librarians. 6(2), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.5325/libraries.6.1.0001.

 Gray, L. & Mehra, B. (2021). "Going Against the Current of Hegemonic 'White-IST' Discourse: A Doctoral Program Journey from Critical Student + Guide Perspectives." Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 62(2).  https://www.jstor.org/stable/27105503.  

 Mehra, B. & Gray, L. (2020). "An 'Owning Up' of White-IST Trends in LIS to Further Real Transformations." Library Quarterly, 90(2), 189-239.  https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/707674

Gray, L. (2026, January). A treasure forever: Chicago’s New Negro Intercollegiate Club and the Wonder Books, 1927 and 1929. Paper presented as part of the panel “Strategic testimonies: How movements create archives and archives create movements,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL.

Gray, L. (2026, June 17-18). Collective Labors: Black Women Librarians and Information Networks in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago.  Black Metropolis Research Consortium 20^th Anniversary Conference. 

Gray, L. (2025). Designing Black Women: Nina Simone, AI and Controlling Images. Three years on: Critical Perspectives on Generative AI. ASPI Symposium, iSchool Syracuse University, November 7, 2025. 

Gray, L. (2025). Bright young things: Chicago’s New Negro Intercollegiate Club and the Wonder Books [Research talk]. Black Metropolis Research Consortium, Blackstone Library, Chicago, IL, February 19, 2025. https://bmrc.lib.uchicago.edu/events/black-history-month-event-research-talk-by-2024-fellow/. https://youtu.be/KNaT1xWvdlc?feature=shared.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNaT1xWvdlc&ab_channel=BMRC-BlackMetropolisResearchConsortium.    

Gray, L., Shoshani, A., & O'Leary, K. (2024). Black Informational Past: History, Data, and Archives of Chicago's ‘New Negro’ Wonder books, [Poster session], Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 61(1), 923-924. Calgary, Canada. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.1141 https://www.asist.org/meetings-events/am/am24/am24-posters/. 

Gray, L. (2023). First of Her Race: The Career and Connections of Margaret Reynolds Hunton, Northern New York Library Network, Continuing Education. November 8, 2023. (Shannon Crooks (PhD Student)-designed the graphics to accompany this presentation)

Gray, L. (2022). Soil Sifting: Unearthing Ancestral Communities in the Black Informational Experience. University of South Carolina Augusta Baker Lecture Series. March 17, 2022. Link to talk: https://youtu.be/tsz9rQmK-f0. 

Nutt, R. & Gray, L. (2021, June). Exploring Collective Voices Online: Creating an Interactive Website of a Historic Black Feminist Information Community, Library History Seminar XI, Spring 2021, Baton Rouge, LA.

Patin, B., Oliphant, T., Allard, D., Gray, L., Clarke, R.I., Tacheva, J. and Lar-Son, K. (2021, October 29 – November 2), At the Margins of Epistemology: Amplifying Alternative Ways of Knowing in Library and Information Science. 84^th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 58: 630-633.  Virtual. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.515. 

Gray, L. (2020, October 22-November 1). Empowered collective: Formulating a black feminist information community model through archival analysis [Poster session]. 83rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Virtual. https://doi-org.libezproxy2.syr.edu/10.1002/pra2.425.