Kristen Iemma is a historian of archival technologies and US imperialism. Her dissertation, "Archival Dispossessions: Record Keeping and US Empire in the Early Twentieth Century," traces the history of United States territorial records removal and consolidation at the US National Archives to interrogate the role of archival technologies in projects of early twentieth century nation-building and imperial expansion.The project argues that state archives have often functioned to establish the infrastructure for knowledge extraction and centralization, creating spatial asymmetries in access to the written historical record.
Iemma received her doctorate in American Studies from Brown University in 2024. She also holds a Master’s in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute and a Master’s in Public Humanities from Brown University. From 2016 to 2017 she served as the Dorothy M. Cooper Endowed Fellow at the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, and from 2021 to 2022 she served as a Fellow at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities at Brown University. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Department II.