Obden Mondésir

Work Title and Work Place

• Associate Director of the Barnard Archives and Special Collections 

• Adjunct Instructor, Queens College (CUNY) Graduate School of Library and Information Studies

Courses Being Taught Presently and/or in the Past

• LBSCI 732: Introduction to Archival Studies

Academic Statement

My approach to teaching is based on a pedagogy of kindness where I hope to trust students and engage with students in seeing where the archives and archival profession and practices such as arrangement, description, preservation, and access fit in the conversation of challenging the assumed normalities of power dynamics especially along the lines of race, gender, class, and nation-state. These conversations are informed by non-reductive and intersectional theoretical concepts that hope to generate the necessary but not sufficient research, presentation, and analysis around the archive and archival theory in hopes of generating political pressure of creating a more egalitarian society.

I am the son of Obed and Denise Mondésir, two wonderful people from Haiti whose migration to the U.S was affected by American imperialism. 

I have been an oral history practitioner and archivist for five years.