Victoria Van Hyning is an Assistant Professor of Library Innovation at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies (iSchool) at College Park. She joined the iSchool in 2020. Before this she served as a Senior Innovation Specialist and Community Manager for Collections and Data on the crowdsourcing project By the People at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Victoria earned a Masters in medieval English literature from Oxford, and a PhD in early modern English literature from the University of Sheffield. She publishes on various literary, digital humanities, and crowdsourcing topics. Her first monograph, Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
Her current research continues in diverse areas, but all stems from her interest in giving more oxygen to marginalized voices and people, whether these are minoritized individuals represented in the historical record or people alive today. Her interests include how to ensure the long-term preservation, use and reuse of volunteer, crowdsourced data and other user-generated content such as reading room photography and community archives; expanding prison librarianship, prison educational programing, and supporting returning citizens; and studying the writings of early modern women. The iSchool allows her to pursue these interests through teaching, research, and hands on projects, through the Center for Archival Futures (CAFe), and Recovering and Reusing Archival Data (RRAD) Lab.
Victoria’s CV: https://umcp.academia.edu/VictoriaVanHyning