Kathleen E. Bethel is the African American Studies Librarian at Northwestern University Library, Evanston, IL. Born in Washington, D. C., Kathleen attended Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, IL, receiving a B.A. in Political Science. She received a Master of Arts in Library Science degree from Rosary College, now Dominican University, River Forest, IL. Kathleen has a Master of Arts degree in African history from Northwestern University. She has worked at the Johnson Publishing Company library, the Newberry Library, and the Maywood and Wilmette Public Libraries. Currently serving on the Council, the governing body of the American Library Association, Kathleen is active with the African American Studies Librarianship Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Black Caucus of ALA (BCALA), and the Chicago Chapter of BCALA. Kathleen is involved in library leadership, diversity, recruitment, and research activities.

Kathleen is a life member and a Chicago Branch member of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History, Inc. A life member and bibliographer for the Toni Morrison Society, she is a member of several groups supporting Black research and collections. She is a member of the Caribbean Studies Association, the Steering Committee of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the Dominican University Graduate School of Library and Information Science Alumni Council, and, serves on the advisory boards for the Project on the History of Black Writing and the online Journal of Pan African Studies. She served as trustee of Chicago's DuSable Museum of African American History, Inc., from 1993 to 2007.

Ms. Bethel has worked on various projects exploring and documenting Black life and culture. In 1994, Kathleen E. Bethel served as an International Non-governmental Observer for the National Elections in the Republic of South Africa, and in 1996, as a Fulbright Library Fellow posted to the University of Durban-Westville, now the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She consulted on Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History's Africa Project.

Last year, Kathleen was honored by her inclusion in The History Makers, the video oral history archive of African American lives. In 2004, Ms. Bethel received the DEMCO/ALA Black Caucus Award for Excellence in Librarianship. During the 2003 Chicago visit of the Freedom Schooner Amistad, she received the Irma Kingsley Johnson Distinguished Service Award from the Chicago Friends of the Amistad Research Center. Kathleen has written biographical entries, book reviews, reports, and bibliographies on a variety of topics in Black Studies. Her treatise, "Afrocentricity and the Arrangement of Knowledge," was published in Afrocentricity and the Academy: Essays on Theory and Practice, edited by James L. Conyers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003).