Bharat Mehra

Bharat Mehra is the EBSCO Endowed Chair in Social Justice and Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama, USA. He is an India-born American library school educator, known for his theoretical and action research, and is author of the Social Justice Laws of Librarianship which extends Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science to address contemporary inequities. Since January 2021, Mehra has been the Series Editor of Advances in Librarianship.

Education and career
Mehra received his PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences in 2004. He also earned an M.A. in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (1999) and an MLA in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a B.A. in Architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, India.

His academic experience includes being an Assistant Professor (2005-2011) and Associate Professor (2011-2018) at the School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee, Nashville. Since January 2019, he has been the EBSCO Endowed Chair in Social Justice and Professor, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alabama.

Mehra was one of three people along with Donna and George Hoemann who made the proposal for the Commission for LGBT People at the University of Tennessee, resulting in the creation of the University's first Commission for LGBTQ+ communities. Mehra was interviewed by personal story as a nonwhite gay man in academia is also available in an oral interview.

Awards
Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)- 2018 Connie Van Fleet Award for Research Excellence in Public Library Services to Adults.