Mario H. Ramirez

Mario H. Ramirez is the Associate Dean and Chief Librarian at The City College of New York (CUNY). Previously, he was Head of Special Collections and Archives at the California State University, Los Angeles, and has also held appointments as Project Archivist at the Bancroft Library (UC Berkeley) and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Hunter College, CUNY). From 2018 to 2019, he was a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received a PhD in Information Studies and a Certificate in Experimental Critical Theory from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017.  

Mario has occupied several leadership and committee positions in the Society of American Archivists, most recently serving as Interim Vice-President (2025) as well as a three-year term on its governing council from 2019-2022. He has taught courses on archives and special collections for the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, the iSchool at the University of Washington, and the California Rare Book School (CalRBS). Mario has also guest lectured at Indiana University, Bloomington; the University of California, Irvine; the University of California, San Francisco; Harvard University; and Simmons University. He has presented at conferences across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. 

Among Mario’s publications are “Whither the Human in Human Rights: On Misrecognition, Ontology, and Archives” (Archivaria), “On ‘Monstrous’ Subjects and Human Rights Documentation” (Emerging Trends in Archival Science), “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Affective Impact of Community Archives” (with Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, American Archivist), and “Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative” (American Archivist). In 2022, he co-guest edited (with Lorena Gauthreau, University of Houston) a special issue of the International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (where he is an Associate Editor) titled “Documenting Transborder Latinidades: Archives, Libraries, and Digital Humanities.” Mario also guest edited (with Rebecka Sheffield) the 50th anniversary issue of Archivaria (Fall 2025) which is dedicated to the legacies of critical theory in archives.