Emma Quinn (she/her)

MA Irish and Irish-American Studies, Spring 2024MLIS, Spring 2024

Emma joined the dual degree program to pursue her goal of becoming a librarian who understood and appreciated the world of academic research. As a scholar, her personal research interests lie in the history of gender and sexuality within the Irish diaspora, especially in relation to the Irish-American Catholic Church. For her master’s thesis in the Irish and Irish-American Studies department, Emma researched relationships between New York's gay and lesbian community and the Archdiocese of New York, both of which had significant Irish-American populations, during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the dual degree program Emma was able to study the workings of large academic research libraries, such as NYU’s Bobst Library. Throughout the program, she worked with many different librarians and found her specific areas of interest within the library and information field: open access and critical pedagogy. Emma interned in the Collections department at Bobst Library and created resources about open access publishing agreements for NYU scholars. This January, Emma was hired as the Learning and Curricular Services Librarian at St. John’s University, and is excited to continue her career as both a librarian and a researcher.