Webcast Speakers

Hema Panesar is a cultural strategist dedicated to shaping impactful experiences that celebrate collaboration, representation, and community. As Registrar of Exhibitions and Loans at the USC Pacific Asia Museum, she brings exhibitions to life—managing everything from high-level logistics and budgets to the intricate coordination of incoming loans and production timelines.

Mantra Roy, in her role as Community Engagement Librarian, is a tenure-track librarian-faculty at the King Library in San José State University. After earning her PhD in American Literature and a brief college teaching career in Florida, she came to the world of libraries.

Dr. Maria McCauley is Director of Libraries for the City of Cambridge. She leads a team of 150 talented staff members and works closely with three boards and across the city to achieve an inclusive, ambitious vision of library services for all. Under her leadership, the Cambridge Public Library (CPL) has expanded its branch hours by 54+ hours per week, opened the award-winning Net Zero Valente Branch library, and launched a STEAM at the Library program including the first free public maker space in Cambridge.

Brian Kelly is Reader in US history at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland),
where he has taught for 25 years, and is former director of the After Slavery Project.
His research and writing focuses on the complicated relationship between race and
class in the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States, with a concentration on
labor and race in the American South. He has published extensively on topics

Jonna C. Paden is an enrolled member of Acoma Pueblo. She is the Archivist at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, NM and the American Indian Library Association (AILA) President. She is an active member of two Special Interest Groups (SIG) of the New Mexico Library Association: Archives & Archivists and Native American Libraries, of which she was a four-term Chair, as well as a member of the Tribal Library Council and the Native Emerging Professionals Network (NEPN) for the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM).

Susan Gehr is an enrolled descendant of the Karuk Tribe, and her family comes from Inaam and Athithúfvuunupma. Formerly a director for the Karuk Tribe’s Language Program, she co-published a dictionary of the Karuk language. She was a member of the SJSU Circle of Learning scholarship program and completed her MLIS in December of 2013. Her MLIS thesis “Breath of Life: Revitalizing California’s Native Languages Through Archives”, was an oral history of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival and a study of the role archivists can have in Native languages revitalization.

Cindy Hohl is a member of the Santee Sioux Nation and is the President of the American Library Association. She is the project manager of the Bridging Knowledge Scholarship at SJSU, sponsored by the IMLS. She is also a past president of the American Indian Library Association (AILA) and works with librarians to share information across the globe as a member of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Indigenous Matters Section and in her work as Co-Chair on the Tribal Library Council for the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM).