Kristina J. Alayan is associate dean for library & technology and associate law school professor. She oversees all aspects of library and technology operations and services through strategic and collaborative leadership to support the advancement of the scholarly, pedagogical, and clinical goals of the law school. Professor Alayan is dedicated to ensuring the library is an active, thriving center for learning and innovation for the law school community.
Before joining the law faculty in 2021, Professor Alayan was the law library director and assistant professor of law at the Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Law Library at the Howard University School of Law. Before that she was at the Georgetown University Law Center and held several positions on the law library management team and served as an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center. Her career began at Duke Law as the Foreign and International Law Librarian & Lecturing Fellow.
Professor Alayan has served in numerous leadership positions at the local, regional, national, and international levels. She was elected chair of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Council of Chapter Presidents and appointed chair of the AALL Awards Committee, which oversees granting the association’s highest honor. In 2021, she was elected to both the AALL executive board and executive committee of the USMAI Consortium. She has also served on the board of the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) for two terms. She is an active member of the Law Librarians' Society of Washington, DC (LLSDC) and served on the board for four years. During her tenure as president, she established the LLSDC Blueprint, which served to operationalize LLSDC’s commitment to diversity and racial justice.
As LLSDC's immediate past president, she secured partners with the Law Library Association of Maryland (LLAM) and the Greater Philadelphia Law Library Association (GPLLA) during the pandemic to found the Project 20/20: From Transition to Transformation series. The series was designed to provide accessible programming at no charge to law librarians around the country. Through the series, law librarians were able to connect with each other during a period of profound uncertainty and disconnection. Over the course of nine months, the three-track series produced one program, one workshop, and one social networking event each month. She was able to secure two New York Times best-selling authors as the opening and closing speakers for the series: Ijeoma Oluo led as the Sandy Peterson Memorial Lecture Keynote Speaker in October of 2020 and Ashley C. Ford delivered the final capstone program in June of 2021. The American Association of Law Libraries recognized the series for outstanding achievement with the 2022 Community Engagement Award.
Professor Alayan has been recognized nationally and internationally by her peers. In 2019, she was awarded the AALL Emerging Leader Award. In 2017, she received an AALL Publication Award in the Nonprint Division for a guide she co-authored with colleagues at Georgetown (A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States). From over 3,300 applicants, she was selected to be one of 180 IFLA Congress Fellows in 2016. She is a frequent speaker on topics related to leadership, change management, diversity, recruitment and retention, and professional advancement. Her research interests include information literacy, access to justice, and foreign and international legal research. As the proud daughter of immigrants, she is deeply committed to serving students who are stepping into uncharted territory as they navigate the legal and law library professions, as well as higher education more generally.
She earned her MLIS with a certificate in Law Librarianship from the University of Washington. She graduated from the University of Oregon School of Law with certificates in the International Law and Pro Bono programs. Her undergraduate degree is from Swarthmore College.