Elizabeth Shaffer

Elizabeth Shaffer serves as an Assistant Professor at the School of Information within the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines critical intersections of race, gender, and digital infrastructures with a focus on social justice, colonialism, and documentation of traumatic human events.

Her scholarship bridges Black Studies and archival science to analyze memory production and archives as sites of contestation. She leads the archive team for the SSHRC-funded Transformative Memory International Network, engaging Indigenous, Black, and Southern knowledges in exploring memory mechanisms within public policy and mass atrocity scholarship.

Prior to UBC, she directed the UBC Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre and the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre's collections, where she spearheaded digitization and preservation initiatives for anti-racism education and genocide-related exhibitions.