Please join us in celebrating the news and accomplishments of our students, alumni, and faculties!
New / Updated Projects
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New / Updated Projects 〰️
Cindy (Sang Yi) Choung is the Consulting Producer of Above and Below the Ground (documentary); premiered at Blackstar, making its way through the film festival circuit. In Myanmar’s first and only country-wide environmental movement, Indigenous women activists and punk rock pastors defend a sacred river from a Chinese-built megadam through protest, prayer, and Karaoke music videos. (Trailer and poster to drop soon!)
Alissa Rae Funderbuck
Alissa Rae Funderburk (2017)’ s Thee Black Pride in JXN oral history project is growing and being featured in Invisible Histories' Magnolia Memories exhibit at the Municipal Art Gallery in Jackson, MS.
Lauren Taylor (2008) submitted a manuscript to CU Press on narrative therapy in the East and the West (a collaborative effort with two other authors).
Nicki Pombier (2013)’s File/Life: We Remember Stories of Pennhurst, exhibited in Arch Street Meeting House, Philadelphia, and in the Russell Senate Building, Washington, DC.
Darold Cuba (2018) founded MarronageOrg (the Marronage Organizing project {tMOp} Lab), which is incubating at the Cambridge Enterprises CRoSS (Commercializing Research out of the Social Sciences) Ideas Incubator, as I begin my second year of my History PhD (St. John's College, Cambridge) which builds on the work I begin at OHMA on freedom colonies and marronage.
Mott Haven resident Nieves Ayress sharing her stories at a Mott Haven Stories of Activism event
Amy Starecheski, in partnership with the Bronx County Historical Society, has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to identify and support five of history keepers in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. Each history keeper will be paid for their time and will be invited to deepen, share, or just continue doing what they do. They will be provided with training if they want it – in things like archiving, oral history, and grant writing – and will be connected with both a mentor and an apprentice. The project aims to expand what counts as humanities work, who counts as humanities workers, and who has access to humanities resources.
New/Updated Writing
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New/Updated Writing 〰️
Sarah Dziedzic (2009) published “Oral History Worker Survey: Results & Recommendations,” a white paper that shares and analyzes the results of a survey Sarah developed and distributed to oral history workers across the cultural work sector. The white paper also includes recommendations for addressing some of the main issues that survey participants identified, such as the need for more permanent oral history jobs, pay transparency, and strategies for diversity, equity, and inclusion that work towards actual structural change. The Oral History Worker Survey and the resulting white paper are part of the Oral History Worker-led Survey & Solidarity Project, which was supported in 2022-2023 by a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded mini-grant awarded by the Oral History Association. Looking ahead, the Survey & Solidarity Project aims to expand its leadership while working towards refining and implementing the recommendations in the white paper. Contact Sarah if you'd like to be involved!
Lynn Lewis’ headshot
Lynn Lewis' (2017) book, Women Who Change the World: Stories from the Fight for Social Justice was published by City Lights, holding events with several of the narrators.
The American Indian Tribal Histories Project (AITHP) is featured in the text Indigenous Oral Oral History Manual: Canada and the United States (second edition). The publication date is 2024. Francine D. Spang-Willis (2019) co-authored this multimillion-dollar oral history project proposal in 2002 when she was a Western Heritage Center museum board member, and, as the AITHP Director, she implemented the project with the AITHP team from 2003 to 2009.
Fanny Julissa García (2016) published an article on narrator compensation in the Oral History Review titled, Money Talks: Narrator Compensation in Oral History. She also launched the website for the project with families that were separated at the U.S./Mexico border in 2017 and 2018. The project is called Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity and it was the project she worked up as a National Endowment for the Humanities and Oral History Association fellow.
Sara Sinclair is currently editing the memoir of former Canadian Senator and Chief Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Murray Sinclair (McClelland & Stewart 2024)
Benji de la Piedra (2014) has a new article, co-authored with Paul Devlin, coming out in the latest issue of Archives of American Art Journal: “Albert Murray’s Approach to Oral Art History: An Epistolary Exchange.” (Fall 2023, Vol. 63, no. 1) The article presents a letter-exchange between two Murray scholars with extensive oral history experience, about a set of four oral histories that Murray conducted with Black painters (Emma Amos, Charles Henry Alston, Merton D. Simpson, and Hale Woodruff) for the Archives of American Art in October-November 1968.
New/Updated Jobs
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New/Updated Jobs 〰️
Five Ex Fabula staff members standing, facing the camera and smiling. Lauren Instenes is on the left, and she is a white young woman with long brown hair.
Lauren Instenes (2019) is currently working as the Marketing & Communications Manager for Ex Fabula. Ex Fabula is a community storytelling organization whose mission is to bring together the Milwaukee area through true personal storytelling. We host StorySlams and storytelling workshops for the general public, organizations, and school/youth groups. Lauren manages the radio program called Real Stories MKE which airs on 89.7 WUWM Milwaukee's NPR and is a way for the organization to broaden the reach of the stories shared at events.
Erica Fugger (2012) recently began a new archivist consulting role with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, one of the oldest peace organizations in the United States. Her work will be focused on exploring a century worth of nonviolent organizing and finding ways for these historical threads to inform FOR’s current campaigns for social justice and peace. Erica's collaboration with FOR also intersects with her doctoral dissertation at Rutgers University, through which she is researching transnational peace movements during the Vietnam-American War.
Holly Werner-Thomas (2017) has been named the new Editor of the Oral History Review.
Ornella U. Baganizi (2021) started a new job as an Archivist in the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which is part of New York Public Library.
Yiwen Li (2021) is working as a communication specialist for dentsu China. Under this position, she proposed an 'Employee Story' section on the company's official social media accounts and conducted oral history interviews with three groups of employees and wrote three articles to promote the corporate culture. My works were also re-posted by the company's HR department.
Exploration of Skills
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Exploration of Skills 〰️
As part of her OHA-NEH Fellowship, Fernanda Espinosa (2015) started In Colors, a project centered around creating new blueprints for institutional approaches to collecting inclusively and intersectionally while identifying and amplifying communities that are vital to the art history of the United States. In addition to being archival partners, from March to June of this year, she also collaborated with Ben Gillespie, Oral Historian at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, to curate and co-create a four-episode series on “Healing and Belonging” for the ARTiculated Podcast (season 3, episodes 3 to 6). The series tackles and commemorates the changes surrounding the Pandemic and reflects on how the world has shifted. For this series Fernanda selected, invited, interviewed, and edited the stories of four artists and put them in dialogue with the oral history collection at the Archives. These artists are among several whose oral histories will soon become part of the Archives’ Oral History Program as part of the In Colors collection.
Gloria Mogango (2023) is a new student joining the OHMA 2023 cohort as a Fulbright student.
Event / Presentation
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Event / Presentation 〰️
Howardena Pindell and Liza Zapol in Pindell's studio.
Liza Zapol presented at the Warren M. Zapol Symposium on Anesthesia and Critical Care Research, with excerpts with oral histories conducted with her father, and shared an excerpt "Dr. Adventure," his forthcoming memoir, which she is co-editing with her brother and mother. Zapol also conducted oral histories with artists Howardena Pindell and Joyce Kozloff.
Caiwei Chen (2021) spoke on Asia Society's Panel on AI's impact on Chinese economy.
Awards and Boards
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Awards and Boards 〰️
A close-up picture of "You are (not) Invited" Installation. A table off food, candles, foudn objects, tupperwares, papers, and flowers. The focus is on a hand, taking a piece of a cake.
Ariel Urim Chung (2022)’s The Kitchen Project (my thesis) received the MAGIC Grant from Brown Institute for Media Innovation! Using archival research with NYU's A/P/A Institute on the fetishization of femme Asians through food and oral histories, we will be creating a digital archive that experiments with sound, affinity, and access. And hopefully more installations of "You are (not) Invited"!!
Meave Sheehan (2016) received the Scharchburg Award in the Graduate category from the Society of Automotive Historians.
Mary Marshall Clark will serve on the advisory board of a new international journal called Public Humanities, supported by Cambridge University Press, which will be an open-access, peer-reviewed venue for a wide audience across the humanities designed to produce papers on pressing issues societies are thinking about.
Sach Takayasu (2019) was invited by the president of Carnegie Mellon University along with some industry leaders to serve on the President's Advisory Board. We analyzed the current state of its college of humanities and social science and made recommendations for its future.