Michelle Caswell

Archivist and scholar

Michelle Caswell is an American archivist and scholar specializing in critical archival studies, community archives, and archival approaches rooted in anti‑racism and social justice. She is associate professor in the Department of information studies at UCLA. She also directs the UCLA Community Archives Lab, which investigates how independent, identity‑based memory organizations archive and shape histories of minoritized communities. She holds a B.A. in religion (Columbia University), an M.T.S. in world religions (Harvard University), an MLIS (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee), and a Ph.D. in library and information studies (University of Wisconsin–Madison). She co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) in 2008, providing a digital repository for South Asian American stories. She is the author of Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (2014), and Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (2021).