Emily Drabinski


Emily Drabinski is an academic librarian, author and teacher working in New York City. She serves as the Interim Chief Librarian and is Critical Pedagogy Librarian at the Graduate Center, CUNY and is a part-time faculty member at Pratt Institute's School of Information. She formerly held the position of Coordinator of Library Instruction at Long Island University, Brooklyn, where she worked from 2008-2019. She was a 2014 Library Journal Mover & Shaker Advocate, and winner of the Ilene F. Rockman Instruction Publication of the Year in 2015 for her article "Towards a Kairos of Library Instruction."

Education

Drabinski earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Columbia University in 1997. In 2003 she received a Master's of Library Science from Syracuse University, and Master of Arts in Composition and rhetoric from LIU Brooklyn in 2011.

Career

Drabinski joined the faculty at the Graduate Center, CUNY in 2019 as Critical Pedagogy Librarian. In March 2020, just as lockdown began in NYC, she assumed the role of Interim Chief of the library, when her predecessor, Polly Thistlethwaite, became Interim University Dean for Library Services at CUNY.
Prior to moving to CUNY, Drabinski was a faculty librarian at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus, where she was the Coordinator of Library Instruction from 2012-2019 and before that served as Electronic Resources and Instruction Librarian. She is a part-time faculty member at the Pratt School of Information, where she teaches the required reference librarianship course, as well as adjuncting at Rutgers and Syracuse universities. Drabinkski's first professional librarian job was at Sarah Lawrence College. She served as a reference librarian from 2004-2008.
She is co-chair of the Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium, along with Baharak Yousefi and Tara Robertson. She is editor of the Library Juice Press Series on Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies. She is co-editor of Critical Library Instruction: Theories & Methods with Maria T. Accardi and Alana Kumbier, and is on the editorial board of Radical Teacher.
Drabinski is the secretary of the Long Island University Faculty Federation and participated actively in the protest by faculty and students at Long Island University - Brooklyn over a lockout associated with faculty contract negotiations.
During the COVID-19 quarantine, Drabinski and her partner, Karen Miller, launched Homeschool Co-op 2020, inviting people to teach classes over Zoom for children and adults. Drabinski led a morning session every day at 8am Eastern Time called Cat Chat.

Research

Drabinski's research focuses on Queer Theory, library instruction and cataloging practice. She has also conducting research about reference services to incarcerated persons with Deborah Rabina.

Selected publications