Victoria Elmwood

Victoria Elmwood is a Scholarly Engagement Librarian at the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library and serves as the subject liaison for Classics, English, French & Italian, and Germanic & Slavic Studies. A veteran instructor of college-level composition, she collaborates closely with the freshman composition program to promote students’ information literacy skills and academic documentation practices. In addition to integrating library instruction into course content for a variety of academic disciplines, she also creates digital modules, slideshows, and videos as well as custom research guides for individual courses.

Victoria holds a combined Ph.D. in English and American Studies and an M.A. in English from Indiana University Bloomington, as well as an M.L.I.S. from LSU Baton Rouge and a B.A. from Reed College. At Indiana, she worked with life writing studies pioneer Paul John Eakin and completed a dissertation on mid-twentieth century countercultural men’s autobiography that read the act of life writing as a tactical response to historical change. Victoria continues to use her subject expertise in life writing, American literature and mass culture, and race and gender studies. She has written reference materials and reviews new books and core subject area collections in these areas for publications such as ChoiceConnect and ABC-CLIO. Her work on Cold War U.S. culture has appeared in Biography, Film and History, Soundings, and Western American Literature, as well as in edited collections.

Her interests in the field of library science include instructional design (digital and f2f), the pedagogy of information evaluation, and student success. As an information science professional, she has published work on applying Lev Vygotsky's educational theories to information literacy and on best practices for teaching students how to identify high quality sources. She has recently presented at local and national conferences on web and digital accessibility; mentoring; social media management; and using web-based text encoding software to teach primary research, critical thinking, and data cleaning skills.

Victoria's service to the profession has included serving on the board of the New Orleans Information Literacy Collective, which holds an annual conference for librarians involved in information literacy. In addition to her activity as a regular reviewer of scholarly monographs, she also serves on the board of the journal Marketing Libraries as a proofreader and copy editor. 

In addition to her academic career, Victoria also spent several years as a high school teacher at Benjamin Franklin High School, a proofreader and copy editor at Peter Mayer Advertising, and a union organizer for United Teachers of New Orleans.