I am an Associate Professor in the Information School at University of Washington and an adjunct faculty member in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies.
In 2025-2026: I am on sabbatical and am a visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies.
Email: mcifor@uw.edu | | iSchool Faculty Page
I am a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies. My research investigates how communities marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, disability, and HIV-status are represented in archives and data systems, and how they document and represent themselves through archives and digital technologies.
My work is driven by questions at the intersection of memory, power, and social justice: What does a society’s relationship to the past reveal about its present and future possibilities? How do archives, data, and digital technologies contribute to the precaritization of minoritized people? How do marginalized communities use documentation and representation to advance more just and equitable worlds?
Previous work: I have published widely in critical information studies, gender and sexuality studies, feminist science and technology studies (STS) and American studies on topics including affect and archives, feminist data studies, and community-based information practices. My first book, Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), delves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activisms alive. It charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States as well as the infrastructure developed to maintain those archives and the activation such records on contemporary digital platforms by artists, archivists, and activists.
Current Projects:
- Information and data activism in buyer’s clubs (second book project): examining transnational efforts to increase access to experimental and alternative treatments from HIV/AIDS medications in the 1980s to Hepatitis C generics and COVID-19 treatments in 2010s and 2020s
- The intersection of computing, internet and the HIV/AIDS crisis
- Making LGBTQ+ resources in libraries, archives, and museums discoverable and accessible through the Homosaurus and Spanish Language Homosaurus projects
- Archiving institutional histories of disability
- The critical intersections of AI and archives
- Community archives theory and practice in public libraries, archival education, and infrastructure
Funding: National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute for Museum and Library Services, Mellon Foundation
I am an Associate Professor in the Information School at University of Washington and an adjunct faculty member in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies.
In 2025-2026: I am on sabbatical and am a visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies.
Email: mcifor@uw.edu | | iSchool Faculty Page
I am a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies. My research investigates how communities marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, disability, and HIV-status are represented in archives and data systems, and how they document and represent themselves through archives and digital technologies.
My work is driven by questions at the intersection of memory, power, and social justice: What does a society’s relationship to the past reveal about its present and future possibilities? How do archives, data, and digital technologies contribute to the precaritization of minoritized people? How do marginalized communities use documentation and representation to advance more just and equitable worlds?
Previous work: I have published widely in critical information studies, gender and sexuality studies, feminist science and technology studies (STS) and American studies on topics including affect and archives, feminist data studies, and community-based information practices. My first book, Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), delves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activisms alive. It charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States as well as the infrastructure developed to maintain those archives and the activation such records on contemporary digital platforms by artists, archivists, and activists.
Current Projects:
- Information and data activism in buyer’s clubs (second book project): examining transnational efforts to increase access to experimental and alternative treatments from HIV/AIDS medications in the 1980s to Hepatitis C generics and COVID-19 treatments in 2010s and 2020s
- The intersection of computing, internet and the HIV/AIDS crisis
- Making LGBTQ+ resources in libraries, archives, and museums discoverable and accessible through the Homosaurus and Spanish Language Homosaurus projects
- Archiving institutional histories of disability
- The critical intersections of AI and archives
- Community archives theory and practice in public libraries, archival education, and infrastructure
Funding: National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute for Museum and Library Services, Mellon Foundation
Affiliations and Leadership: I am xommitted to building robust interdisciplinary research communities and to advancing the work of emerging critical information scholars. This includes:
- Co-PI of the Knowledge of AIDS Network, an international research community of HIV/AIDS scholars in STS.
- Associate Editor of Special Sections for Catalyst: Feminism, Theory and Technoscience,
- Co-chair of the organizing board of the Homosaurus,
- At the iSchool, I am the co-founder of AfterLab and I am affiliated the Technology and Social Change (TASCHA) group and the Center for Advances in Libraries, Museums, and Archives (CALMA).
Education and Appointments:
2019- Assistant, now Associate Professor, Information School at the University of Washington (promoted 2024).
2018-19: Assistant Professor of Information and Library Science at Indiana University, Bloomington
2017-2018: Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, where I was also affiliated with the Digital and Computational Studies Initiative.
2017, PhD, Department of Information Studies, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and certificates in Gender Studies and the Digital Humanities.
2012, MA in History and MS Library and Information Science, Simmons College
2007: BA in History and Political, Legal and Economic Analysis, Mills College
MARIKA CIFOR 