Alissa Rae Funderburk is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded Oral Historian for the Margaret Walker Center at the HBCU Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. She maintains an oral history archive that, like the Center, is dedicated to the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of African American history and culture. As part of her work, Alissa Rae has recently developed thoughtful strategies for transcribing the unique voices of Black people, teaching workshops and guest lecturing on the subject for various institutions and organizations. Previously, she created an oral history course for high school students at the Roger Lehecka Double Discovery Center and conducted freelance oral history interviews for the city of Jersey City.

While completing coursework in the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia, Alissa Rae served as the Deputy Director of the Columbia Life Histories Project alongside its co-founder Benji de la Piedra. Her OHMA thesis on the religious and spiritual experiences of Black men in New York City was based on her studies of race, culture, religion, and the African diaspora, when graduating from Columbia College in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology as a John W. Kluge Scholar. Alissa Rae is a native New Yorker, avid reader, and yoga enthusiast with a passion for travel.

Pronouns: she/her/hers
Location: Jackson, Mississippi
Languages: English
Looking for: Consulting
Skills/Interests: teaching (workshops), presenting, consulting, transcription, public speaking, writing, curating, interviewing, audio editing, indexing, digitization, project planning
Email: alissa.funderburk@jsums.edu