Brian Rosenblum

Brian Rosenblum — Senior Research Fellow

Neotropical Anthropology Laboratory (NAL)

Director, Institute for Globally Engaged Librarianship (IGEL)

Brian Rosenblum is Director of the Institute for Globally Engaged Librarianship (IGEL) at the University of Kansas Libraries, where he develops and coordinates international library engagement programs, including global partnerships, exchanges, collaborative research initiatives, and professional development activities. IGEL was founded in 2025 to advance globally engaged, ethically grounded approaches to librarianship and scholarly collaboration.

From 2010 to 2025, Brian served as the founding co-director of KU’s Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH). In that role, he helped build a nationally and internationally recognized center for digital humanities research, teaching, and collaboration, supporting faculty- and community-driven projects that bridged disciplinary, institutional, and geographic boundaries.

Brian’s professional and research interests include open access and scholarly communication, electronic publishing, public digital humanities, shadow libraries, minimal computing, and international and cross-border library collaboration. He has led or contributed to dozens of digital scholarly projects, many with global, multilingual, or community-engaged dimensions. Notable projects include the African Digital Humanities initiative (co-led with James Yékú); the NEH-funded Public Digital Humanities Institute; the Urarina Digital Heritage Project, a trilingual, community-centered collaboration with Indigenous partners in the Peruvian Amazon; Huellas Incómodas, documenting social protest movements in the Americas; and a crowdsourced digital edition of Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical and Physical Opinions.

These initiatives reflect Brian’s strengths in collaborative project design, ethical digital stewardship, multilingual knowledge production, and sustained partnership with Indigenous and community collaborators—capacities that align closely with NAL’s commitments to collaborative anthropology, public scholarship, and international research networks.

Brian regularly leads workshops and short-form instruction sessions on digital scholarship and collaborative research methods. He was a Fulbright Scholar in 2003–2004 in the Czech Republic and a Fulbright Specialist in 2022 at the University of Ghana, where he taught an introduction to digital humanities. Since 2017, he has collaborated with faculty in Mexico on student-driven digital humanities pedagogy.

Brian holds a Master of Science (M.S.) in Information from the University of Michigan School of Information. Prior to joining KU, he worked at the University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office from 2000 to 2005, where he developed electronic journals and digital projects at a formative moment in the evolution of online scholarly publishing.

As a Senior Research Fellow with NAL, Brian contributes deep expertise in digital infrastructure, international collaboration, and ethically grounded public scholarship, strengthening the laboratory’s capacity to support globally engaged, community-centered anthropological research.