BHum (Carleton), MA (Concordia), MISt (University of Toronto)
Supervised by Michael Epp
Karen Suurtamm received her MA in English Literature from Concordia University (2005), where she studied class, surveillance, and the limits of archival desire in 19th century literary representations of the photographer. She then received her MISt (Archival Studies/Library and Information Science) from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information in 2008. Karen has more than 10 years’ experience as an academic archivist and was an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, where she taught graduate courses in archival studies from 2019-2022. As of August 2022, Karen is the University Archivist and Head, Special Collections at Trent University.
In her doctoral work, Karen is examining archives as a set of processes and practices, working through issues in documentary ethics, and finding new ways of looking at persistent questions in archival studies. Her dissertation comes to these questions by researching how incarceration is documented in Canadian archives and other sites of memory work.