Deborah Hollis

Deborah Hollis is a professor on the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries faculty and leads Rare & Distinctive Collections in teaching that inspires curiosity in students.  She and her colleagues develop active-learning assignments for class instruction featuring rare works and primary sources that often results in students creating an artistic response.

Hollis is a certified archivist and member of the Society of American Archivists, the Society of Photographic Education (SPE), and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. She critiques student and professional photographic portfolios at SPE conferences. Her research and writings focus on the historic and continued lack of diversity in academic librarianship, special collections pedagogy and special subject collections analysis. Professor Hollis is a founding member of the Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing, a digital humanities project that aims to recover four centuries of women’s writing held in the private library of the nineteenth-century Anglican curate, the Reverend Francis J. Stainforth.