A Virtual Conversation with Gregory Eow, Daniel Greene, Ellen Keith, and Marcia Walker-McWilliams
Thursday, July 9, 2020Join the new directors of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the Center for Research Libraries, and the Newberry for a discussion about how cultural organizations in Chicago are confronting the turbulent events of this year and how collaborations can help organizations prepare for and address future challenges.
The discussion will be led by Ellen Keith, Director of Research and Access and Chief Librarian at the Chicago History Museum and 2020 Board Chair of the Chicago Collections Consortium.
This program is co-sponsored by the Newberry Library, a CCC founding member.
About the Speakers:
Gregory T. Eow is President of the Center for Research Libraries, where he is responsible for setting strategic directions and determining overall CRL programming and services in collaboration with the CRL Board of Directors, staff, member libraries, and strategic partners. Before joining CRL in 2019, he served as the Associate Director for Collections at the MIT Libraries, where his administrative portfolio included overseeing scholarly communications and collections strategy, digital preservation, acquisitions and metadata creation, and the Institute Archives and Special Collections. He holds a PhD in U.S. history from Rice University and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh.
Daniel Greene became the President and Librarian at the Newberry in 2019. He is also an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. Prior to arriving at the Newberry, Greene curated Americans and the Holocaust, an exhibition that opened in April 2018 at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. His book The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Indiana University Press, 2011) won the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener Prize in American Jewish History in 2012. Greene has been a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians since 2015. He earned his PhD in history at the University of Chicago.
Ellen Keith is the 2020 Board Chair of the Chicago Collections Consortium and Director of Research and Access and Chief Librarian at the Chicago History Museum, which she joined in 2012. She has been an active member of the Chicago Collections Consortium since returning to Chicago in 2012, when she served as co-chair of the Cooperative Reference Committee and as a member of the Strategic Planning Task Force. She received her BA in Victorian studies from Vassar College, as well as an MLIS from Dominican University and an MLA from Johns Hopkins University.
Marcia Walker-McWilliams is the Executive Director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC). As Executive Director, Marcia provides strategic leadership for the consortium’s activities and works with BMRC member institutions and the public to facilitate the discovery, preservation, and use of Black historical collections in Chicago. She is the author of Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Marcia received a PhD in American history from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate degree in social policy and African American studies from Northwestern University.