NaVosha Copeland

PhD Student

Brief Bio

NaVosha Copeland is a PhD student in the School of Information Studies. She specializes in Archival Science, and her main research interests are outreach, appraisal, community archives, and digital preservation. As a professional archivist, she has experience in processing archival collections. In addition to her research interests, she is also interested in how undergraduate college students from historically marginalized groups perceive their university archives as well as what these students expect from their university archives. In 2016, she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Emory University in Interdisciplinary Studies in Society & Culture with a concentration in Race and Difference. In 2017, she was awarded the Society of American Archivists’ Harold T. Pinkett Student of Color Award for her work in preserving Emory University’s Emory Black Student Union records as an undergraduate student and then going on to process the archival collection as an intern in Emory University’s archives in the summer of 2016. In 2018, she obtained a Master of Science degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in 2020, she obtained a Master of Arts degree in History from Georgia State University. For her master’s degree in History, she researched how Southern African-American women built their own libraries and educated the youth in rural settings as well as in urban settings (Atlanta, Georgia’s public housing) from 1865-1975. She is committed to continuing to learn about archives, digital preservation, diversity, and equity in order to make archives more accessible to all persons.