About Lae’l

Lae’l Hughes-Watkins is the Founder of Project STAND, the first-of-its-kind collaborative effort among archival repositories within academic institutions across the country to create an online portal, featuring analog and digital collections that document student activism that primarily focus on historically marginalized communities. The project has received over $800,000 in grant funding from The Mellon Foundation and IMLS. She is the University Archivist for the University of Maryland, in College Park, where she also serves as a Co-chair for the 1856 Project, a chapter of Universities Studying Slavery. From 2013-2018 she served as the University Archivist at Kent State University. She is a 2019 Mover and Shaker. She is a 2019 ARL Leadership and Career Development Program fellow and serves on the Advisory Board for the Archives Leadership Institute. She is the creator of the reparative archive framework and workshop and has given multiple national and international keynotes.