Gwendolyn Kirk is responsible for managing collections pertaining to South Asian Studies and Southeast Asian Studies. She also works to assist faculty and students interested in these regions to navigate IU's collections as well as accessing external resources.

Gwendolyn's own research has been on cultural production in Urdu and Punjabi with an emphasis on Pakistani cinema and screen cultures. She is a linguistic anthropologist by training, so her research interests lie at the intersection of language, culture, identity, and power. Recently, she published an article on the history of South Asian librarianship in the US entitled "The Books in the Bunker: Global Flows of Meaning and Matter in Academic Assemblages." A full list of her publications is available on her website. Additionally, Gwendolyn currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (since 2018). She is proud to have co-founded Reel Pakistan, the first scholarly periodical dedicated to Pakistani screen cultures.

She earned her M.A. (2011) and Ph.D. (2016) in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Previously she taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. She received her B.A. in Linguistics and in South Asian Studies from the University of Virginia in 2009. As teaching faculty, one of the things she enjoyed most was helping her students to become researchers in their own right. At IU Libraries she is excited to continue facilitating and supporting scholars working on South and Southeast Asia.