Stacie Williams Appointed SAA Publications Editor

Stacie M. Williams, director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Chicago, was appointed Publications Editor of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and will begin her three-year term on April 1, 2020. The appointment was made by the SAA Council following a five-month search.

Williams will helm a program that has published 90 books along with dozens of case studies and other electronic content since 2000. The Publications Editor is responsible for setting a vision and providing philosophical direction for the program, directing the work of the twelve-member Publications Board, acquiring and reviewing manuscripts, and maintaining a transparent review process.

Williams has published and lectured widely in the archives, library, and journalism professions. Her work has appeared in SAA’s journal American Archivist, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, LitHub, New York Magazine, and The Rumpus. She is the author of Bizarro Worlds (Fiction Advocate, 2018), a bibliomemoir interrogating gentrification and race in Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude. Within SAA, Williams has served as newsletter editor for the Archivists and Archives of Color Section, co-chair of the Women Archivists Section, and chair of the 2017–2018 Nominating Committee. She attended the 2015 Archives Leadership Institute and subsequently served on the institute’s faculty in 2017 and 2018. 

In addition, Williams has served or currently serves on the advisory boards for the Digital Library Federation, which provides guidance on the design and application of digital library technologies; Rhizome’s National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web; the community activist-driven oral history project A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland; and Documenting the Now, which develops tools and practices for the ethical collection and preservation of social media content.

“Publishing is foundational to how we perform our work,” said Williams, who holds a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a master of science degree in library science with an archives management concentration from Simmons College. “Having access to the perspectives and processes of our peers—historical, contemporary, and futurist—is how we share our work with each other and also how we challenge it.”

Williams will succeed Christopher J. Prom, Associate Dean for Digital Strategies at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, who is completing his second three-year term as SAA Publications Editor.