Q. How can I find information about a former student?

Archives & Special Collections receives many requests for historical information about students who may have attended and/or graduated from American University. However, student records such as enrolled classes, coursework, transcripts, enrolled social activities, are not and have never been transferred to AU Archives due to privacy laws. The AU Archives & Special Collections does not manage student registration records such as transcripts. Researchers can contact the AU Office of the Registrar for information about a former student or alumni's years of attendance and academic program, etc. The Registrar’s Office can be reached at registrar@american.edu.

AU Archives collections generally include records of students and their activities if they themselves donated materials or a full collection, if they participated in a student group that donated materials, and/or if they are mentioned in an AU publication (such as The Eagle newspaper or the Yearbooks, commencement programs, or other publications etc).

The majority of our older student and university publications have been digitized and are available online in our Digital Collections repository, a fully searchable site that includes digitized materials from our collections and also links to our collections in the Internet Archive. Researchers are encourage to browse and search within the repository using the various spellings of the name you mentioned along with other keywords you think might be useful.

• Direct link to Digital Collections home page: https://digitalcollections.american.edu/

• Direct Link to The Eagle (student newspaper) collection: https://digitalcollections.american.edu/all-university-archives-1/list/university-archives/814

• Direct link to webpage with list of all AU publications including the commencement programs, yearbooks, and others: https://digitalcollections.american.edu/au-publications

Of note - the Eagle and Yearbooks typically focus on undergraduate student life. It can be difficult to find traces of graduate students in these sources. For early AU students, many of the course catalogs included directories of enrolled students.