Stephanie Birch (she/her) is the Africana Studies Librarian at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. She earned her MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016, with a joint MA in African Studies. She also earned a MA in History and a BFA in Art History, concentrating in African and Diaspora Art.

Prior to joining UConn in January 2022, Birch served as the African American Studies Librarian at the University of Florida since 2016. She was also library liaison to the Oral History Program and curator of the Dr. Patricia Hilliard-Nunn Black Film & Film Literature Collection, which launched in February 2021. Birch played a pivotal role in the re-development of the Joel Buchanan Archive of African American Oral History, the largest open-access repository of Black oral histories in the Gulf South. Birch also lead the Libraries’ Carceral Studies acquisitions cluster, an interdisciplinary team working to collaboratively enhance holdings across collections and branches related to mass incarceration, confinement, policing, prison labor economies, immigration detention, and beyond. Her research interests include community-based engagement and research; learner-centered library instruction, outreach, and engagement; and Black digital humanities.