Jennifer Douglas and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed Join SLAIS the iSchool at UBC

April 21, 2016

From the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (The iSchool@UBC):

The School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (The iSchool@UBC) is very pleased to announce the appointment of two new tenure track Assistant Professors to begin July 1st, 2016.

Dr. Jennifer Douglas will take up our Archival Science position. Dr. Douglas earned her PhD at the University of Toronto and has been doing outstanding work at the UBC iSchool as a lecturer and term Assistant Professor since 2014. Her research areas include personal archives; writers’ archives; archival arrangement and description; history and evolution of archival theory; online communities and archives; and archival representation. Her current research explores the role of recordkeeping in grieving. Her dissertation, entitled Archiving Authors: Rethinking the Analysis and Representation of Personal Archives, won the iSchools Dissertation Award in 2014, and that same year, she was awarded the W. Kaye Lamb prize for the Archivaria journal article that most advances archival thinking in Canada. She is the current General Editor of Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists.

Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed will take up our position in Information and Media Studies. Dr. Abdul-Mageed completed a dual Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics and Information Science at Indiana University in 2015. Between 2010 and 2012, he was a Visiting Scholar in the Center for Computational Learning Systems, Columbia University. He is currently a fellow of the Center of Computer-Mediated Communication in IU and serves as a member of the standing reviewing committee for Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. His interests lie at the intersection of social media, natural language processing, and machine learning. He is an expert on Arabic sentiment analysis and is especially interested in learning from people and data over social media and creating more ‘social’ machines. “I’m excited about joining the talented SLAIS colleagues,” says Dr. Abdul-Mageed, “to shape the future of the iSchool, UBC, and the world!”

Dr. Freund, Acting Director of the iSchool, commented, “both these scholars have outstanding research profiles and exemplary teaching records, and are poised to build on the strengths of the School and the University. We welcome them as colleagues and look forward to exciting times ahead.”