About
Lorna Dawes is an Associate Professor and Social Sciences Librarian at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. For the past six years, she has served as the primary consultant for the African Poetry Libraries, a project administered by the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF). She is well published in the areas of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Human Information Behavior and the information experiences of first-year students.
In 2017 she was invited to present her research at the Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) Swansea, Wales and in 2020 that research was recognized by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Instruction Roundtable as one of the top twenty articles in library instruction literature for 2019. In 2019 she was awarded an ACRL Mid-Career Scholarship and also in that year was awarded an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Digital Scholarship to attend ARL Digital Humanities Institute that summer. She is active in the profession and has served as the Chair and Vice Chair of several ACRL committees.
Although her primary research area is in SOTL and information literacy, in the last three years she has been actively involved in the digital humanities and currently serves as a Research Fellow in the Center for Digital Humanities at UNL. In 2019 Lorna was the Co-Pi on a grant from the Ford Foundation to begin work on the African Poetry Digital Portal (APDP) that serves as a resource for the study of the history of African Poetry. As a part of that grant, Lorna curated an exhibit on the APBF collaborating with MacArthur award winning artist Walter Kitundi. The interactive traveling exhibit – The African Poetry Book Fund- the first five years was mounted at UNL Libraries and Oxford ( Oxford, England). For the Ford funded project, Lorna managed the development of the recently launched African Poetry Digital Portal. In July 2021, Lorna and her Co-Pi, Dr. Kwame Dawes received a Mellon Foundation Grant to fund the next stage for African Poetry Digital Portal. In addition to serving as the editor of the African Poetry in the News section of the Portal, that explores how the depictions and patronization of African Poetry in the news influence and shaped perceptions of what African poetry is in the 21st century, Lorna is currently with several partnering institutions to develop the African Poetry Collections Hub section of the portal.
In 2021 Lorna also received a University of Nebraska New Directions Grant. With this grant Lorna and her Co-Pi, Charlene Maxey-Harris began an analysis of the ” The Impact of the University expansion on neighboring African American communities in Lincoln, Nebraska”. This site is the first phase of this project. In 2025 they received a CLIR grant titled " Recovering Lost Stories: Digitizing the History of the Clyde Malone Community Center, the heartbeat of an “invisible” Black community in Lincoln, Nebraska. To being the digitization of the Malone Center Archives and document the history of the African American community that lived in the Malone Neighborhood.