Tajah Ebram

Dr. Tajah Ebram is the Black Studies Librarian at Rutgers University Libraries. In addition to supporting faculty and students working in Black studies, Dr. Ebram also serves as the Rutgers lead for the Black Bibliography Project, which seeks to revitalize the practice of descriptive bibliography for African American literary and cultural studies. She collaborates across the campus and with BBP colleagues at Yale University.

Dr. Ebram received her PhD in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in 20th-century Black literary and cultural studies, with a focus on Black radicalisms. Her dissertation was an interdisciplinary cultural history of the MOVE Organization. Dr. Ebram comes to us from Haverford College, where she taught courses on Black Philadelphia, race and ecology, and Black feminisms and the carceral state. She brings additional expertise in cultural geography, public humanities, and digital humanities.

Previous Organizations: 

• University of Pennsylvania
• Haverford College 

Bibliographic Study has long been an invigorating field of scholarship, but in the past five years it has become a thriving site of breakthrough initiatives and collaborations among scholars, librarians, curators, artists, and digital humanists.

Led by Co-Directors Meredith McGill (Professor of English at Rutgers University and the 2019-20 Beinecke Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities at Yale University) and Jacqueline Goldsby (Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University), The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) aims to revive and transform Descriptive Bibliography—the systematic description of print materials as physical objects—for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies. The goal is to create a digital database whose capacities can reveal the dynamic social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture in the U.S. and beyond.

McGill and Goldsby believe that the digital environment is ideally suited for bibliographic information: unlike codex bibliographies, a digital bibliographic database can be queryable, expandable, revisable, and re-organizable (no longer ordered only by the lives of authors); it can include images of covers, illustrations, and vital bibliographic details; it can also be crowd-sourced and publicly accessible. By tapping the explanatory potential of digital technologies (specifically, the revolutionary metadata approach called “Linked Data”), the goal of this project is to build an electronic database whose networking capacities can reveal the social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture, in the U.S. and across the Black Diaspora.  

Dr. Tajah Ebram was appointed as the First Black Studies Librarian in 2023 and also serves as the lead for the Black Bibliography Project.

In April, 2026, the BBP convened the Networking Black Print: Reimagining Black Bibliography gathering as a chance to lift up and reflect on work that is re-shaping the practices of Black Bibliography—including the database our project has been building for the past 8 years.

Learn more about the Black Bibliography Project here.