Anne Cardenas is an Oral Historian and Audio Producer. She created the podcast “Grassroots & Hope: Campaigning for Obama” based on the interviews she conducted with 2008 Obama campaign staffers. Her other research interests include folklore, family histories, Abraham Lincoln and American History. Anne is a proud Obama Administration alum, having worked at the White House & DHS, before moving to New York and working for VICE Media and the UNDP. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Florida State University in 2011 and completed her Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University in 2020.
Nora Waters (2018)
Nora is an interdisciplinary oral historian. Nora's OHMA thesis "Stories We Tell of The River" is a collection of prints, photographs, interview transcripts, and creative non-fiction essays that unearths relationships to the Milwaukee River as a way to critically engage with the cities' segregated landscape. Currently, Nora is collaborating with the Lesbian Elders Oral Herstory Project.
Brad Bailey (2017)
Brad Bailey, originally from Moultrie, Georgia, is a recent graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. He received his B.A. from Yale University in Political Science and his Masters of Public Affairs from Princeton. Brad is an avid fan of telling stories, especially those from underexposed communities. At Columbia, he wants to delve even deeper into the methodological and analytical aspects of interviewing, while exploring the nexus of oral histories and journalism.
Holly Werner-Thomas (2017)
Holly Werner-Thomas is a writer and oral historian whose practice is grounded in historical scholarship and current events, but who has a passion for true stories no matter the topic. She is a graduate of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University, where she initiated an ongoing effort to capture the stories of gun violence victims (“The 40 Percent Project: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America”). Her documentary play based on the interviews, The Survivors, won the Columbia University 2020 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Holly is on an upcoming OHA panel this fall, “Is Oral History White? Investigating Race in Three Baltimore Oral History Projects.” She is also currently visiting oral history consultant for History Associates, Inc., leading projects for the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lemelson-MIT Program.
Alissa Funderburk (2017)
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. 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.
Kim-Hee Wong (2018)
Word Search Wizard.
Hawaiian Hula Dancer.
Chinese Yum Cha Connisuer.
Korean Kim Chee Maker.
This is me: Kim-Hee Wong.
Aloha! Growing up in Hawaiʻi we are surrounded by lush green mountains, beautiful beaches and a variety of cultures and people from around the world. I love to run on the beach, hike mountains and chase waterfalls. When not listening to podcasts, my Spotify playlists rotates between pop, R&B, acoustic and Hawaiian music. Despite my experience as a Starbucks barista, I prefer to drink cups of green tea all day. I love going on adventures, trying new foods and exchanging stories of different communities and cultures. I am excited to share the moʻolelo, stories, of my people and bring their voices back to life. It is my hope that by doing so the aloha spirit will carry on.
Heesup Kimm (2018)
I earned my B.A. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Political Science.
I have been searching vigorously for the opportunity that would help me develop certain skills I needed for my future projects and enable me to achieve my career goal which is to support and provide aids specific groups of individuals, especially the patients from minority backgrounds and the elderlies who have difficulties communicating with other cultures due to lack of language abilities.
I am originally from Seoul, South Korea. And as an immigrant myself, who also has a non-native English speaking background, I've seen numerous people facing similar challenges due to their lack of local language skills. Not knowing the local language is the biggest obstacle in the way of successful expat assignments because it leads to bigger challenges like relocating family, finding appropriate housing, and organizing tax affairs, etc.
In addition to my recent research project at NYU, I have participated in a variety of volunteer services in different places including South Korea and the United States. As a volunteer, I not only found it rewarding in terms of what was achieved, but also discovered talents in myself that I had not appreciated before.
I believe that the goals Columbia University's OHMA program pursues are no different from mine. I wish to make changes, no matter what sizes they are, that eventually sparks a big influence in our society, through new challenges and opportunities I will be experiencing in the near future.
Rebecca McGilveray (2018)
Rebecca comes to Columbia from Glasgow, Scotland and is the first Scottish student to join the OHMA programme. She has recently graduated from the University of Strathclyde with a degree, with honours in History. At school, Rebecca never particularly enjoyed History – finding that it was less about understanding and more about passing an exam. She found more joy in listening to her grandparents and Great Aunts recalling their lives and the adventures they had been on. Only later on, while at university did she discover Oral History and finally found a discipline that felt intuitive and natural to her. Her dissertation ‘The Bucky Made Me Do It’: Exploring Glasgow’s relationship with Buckfast and its Impact on Crime, Deindustrialisation and the Glasgow Effect’ used oral history testimonials to form the backbone of her research into a heavily neglected aspect of Glasgow’s history. Her research interests include histories of addiction, toxic masculinity, homelessness and how conceptualisations of the body and self influence Oral History testimonies. She is looking forward to broadening her horizons outside the context of her home city and cannot wait to join this year’s cohort at OHMA.
Nairy Abdelshafy (2018)
Nairy is an enthusiastic social activist with a passion for community service and social work. An Egyptian Fulbright Scholar to the OHMA program, she draws from her experience to document movement and transition narratives for social change. She has worked and volunteered on non- formal education, self expression and intercultural learning with children, youth, adults and refugee communities for over ten years and has worked on documenting narratives of identity and movement with Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Cairo, New Damietta and Port Said, and Nubians' reflections on displacement in Aswan. She appreciates food, enjoys travel and believes one has to be laid back to be able to take on life and take in its beauty.
Monica Liuting (2016)
Monica Liuting comes to OHMA with an MA of English Literature from China University of Geosciences, Beijing. She worked as a volunteer worker in Changzhu Historical and Cultural Ancient Town Program (Shannan, Tibet) as an interviewer and writer after graduation.
Monica came to OHMA with an interest in exploring the construct of the narrative in sociological, literary, and oral historical domains. She was an intern with the Queer Newark Oral History Project in 2016 and is working on her thesis project on Chinese Young Artists in 2017.
Carlin Liu Zia (2017)
Carlin Liu Zia is a polyhyphenate oral historian and maker whose questions include how we know what we know and how we came to be where we are. One of her favorite tools and one of her driving curiosities is silence.
Carlin is a graduate of OHMA, where her thesis Uncertain Journeys won the 2019 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History award. Uncertain Journeys, an epic poem in an invented form, records the life story of Carlin’s Chinese-born grandfather while simultaneously charting her own project of self-historicization. The first pages can be found on Oral History Works, along with an audio piece and short film created from the same fieldwork.
More recently, Carlin has worked on a range of projects across these similar themes of consciousness, movement, intergenerationality (she 100% doubts this is a word; she 99% agrees it shouldn’t be), and encounter. In summer 2020 she was an inaugural grantee of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative, collaborating with scholars and grassroots organizations in Greece to incorporate oral history, project-based learning, and digital exhibition methodologies into local migration and material history culture. Carlin is also an interviewer and transcriptionist for the Rikers Public Memory Project. She has lectured and taught workshops on transcription as a creative act, and recently co-authored the transcription style guide for an oral history memoir book project. She has freelanced across the field, from videography and post-production to qualitative research consultation.
For the past two years leading up to her current appointment, Carlin has been working with OHMA as a Teaching Apprentice, and has co-curated the past three year-end fieldwork exhibits, including the first-ever fully virtual exhibit in Spring 2020.
Carlin holds a BA with Distinction in English from Yale College. You can contact her at carlin.zia@columbia.edu.
Lynn Lewis (2017)
Lynn Lewis: I am a life-long social justice worker who believes in the power of collective analysis and direct action to win justice. Having witnessed the strength and resourcefulness of folks who have chosen to join with others in social justice work I am committed to document those stories and to amplify those lessons. From housing struggles on the Lower East Side, to revolutionary Nicaragua and Venezuela, what has always inspired me is that each of us has the potential to make change. I met the co-founders of Picture the Homeless in 2000 just after its founding, and am honored to have worked with and learned from the incredible homeless leaders who together have built the only homeless led organization in NYC, and one of the few nationally for seventeen years. I wanted to learn the art and science of oral history to document the work of Picture the Homeless as well as other social movements, and to share those brilliant and nuanced organizing lessons.
The OHMA program expanded my understanding of how to do that in so many ways. It became an intellectual home and a place to initiate an oral history practice rooted in social justice. As I began interviewing for the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project I started out thinking like an organizer with a tape recorder but engaging with an initial cohort of long time homeless leaders while I was in the program informed my praxis. I’ve been calling this approach participatory oral history research (POHR). Since graduating, I continue to deepen my understanding of oral history with the Picture the Homeless Oral History project. My focus now is to continue interviewing but also to support the participation of the narrators who have committed to serve on the projects advisory board and to understand what that means, and what that will take. I’ve begun integrating lessons embedded in the interviews in my work as a trainer in community organizing and have created short audio pieces that illustrate themes contained within the narrators stories. Facilitating a weekend retreat with a homeless organizing group in Baltimore revealed how powerfully organizing lessons can be transmitted via audio.
The Picture the Homeless Oral History project continues and I'm grateful for the opportunity to explore ways to create space for participation, collaboration and shared authority with the project's advisory board - and having fun making zines - I am working as consultant as a community organizing trainer and coach, a grant-writer. and as an adjunct professor Additionally, I'm working with a NYC social justice elder on their memoir, using oral history as a tool to gather stories and am excited to share that my article, “Love and Collective Resistance: Lessons from the Picture the Homeless Oral History Proect,” will be included in the forthcoming special Activist Lives thematic issue of Histoire sociale / Social History in 2020.
Dian Zi (2017)
Originally from Shanghai, China, Dian Zi joins the 2017 OHMA cohort as a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College where she concentrated in History and Public Policy. Her interest in oral history stems from her curiosity of her family's experience of the Cultural Revolution. With the desire to learn a different and genuine perspective on history, she attended Sarah Lawrence College with the intention to study East Asian History. As a first-year student, Dian took a seminar, "Multimedia Use of Oral History" with Professor Gerry Albarelli. She was intrigued by the value of oral history- encouraging the narrators to recollect the personal details of public history, clarifying the memories which are muddled, and most importantly, broaching answers that people were afraid to recall. Oral history presents her an opportunity to ask the questions she always wanted to know of her family her country.
Since her first foregather with oral history, Dian has decided to record more stories of the unheard people during her undergraduate study. In her sophomore year, she completed a documentary called "Borders" about a North Korean refugee named Jinhye Jo. In her junior year, she recorded an oral history project "Individualizing Africa" on women in Tanzania, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. In her senior year, she conducted a senior oral history project called "The Many Faces of Us: An Oral History of Modern Feminism in China" to reveal and preserve the unheard stories of the the seemingly futile battle against misogynist patriarchy in China. Oral history has become her approach to make peace with the chaotic world and to remake connections with people she adores.
Her post-graduate intentions are not only to pursue her dream as an oral historian, but also to introduce the concept of oral history to her people in China. In addition, she calls herself a "hardcore feminist", Dian writes on the cause of gender equality, and looks forward to apply the oral history skills to gather and present collective stories of feminists of her generation. She currently resides in Bronxville, NY with her husband, also an advocate of oral history.
Desmond Austin-Miller (2017)
Desmond Austin-Miller joins the 2017 OHMA cohort as a recent graduate of Lafayette College where he majored in Anthropology & Sociology with a minor in Africana Studies. A native of Washington D.C., Desmond spent his summers in the District working in various spheres of the non-profit scene in education administration and homeless advocacy. Desmond hopes to further explore his research interests at Columbia in human rights activism, homelessness, power, race, and a multitude of other topics through the methodological lens of oral history.
Yiyi Zhang (2017)
Yiyi Zhang graduated from Brandeis University with a B.A. in Philosophy and from Columbia University with a M.A. in Philosophy. Her interests shift from Philosophy to Oral History in 2016 as she was involved in a Oral History project. She is specifically interested in giving the oppressed group voice, the ignored people attention and building understanding and nurturing compassion through oral history. Yiyi is a world traveler. Besides countries in North America and Europe, she has also been to countries in South Asia, Central Asia and Africa for volunteer works and independent studies. Yiyi is always ready to encounter and be inspired by new people and new stories.
Yameng Xia (2017)
When I was an undergraduate student at Fudan University, I participated in an oral history project aimed to explore the living conditions of 50 Shanghai intellectual disabled people and their families. I conducted a survey of two of the families and performed the interview, the observation, and wrote a 20000-word report.
After that, I have realized that oral history is not only a method to provide new historical data, but also a method to record the life experiences of vulnerable groups and to raise the public awareness to help such group, such as disabled people, women, and educated youths who are in bad living conditions, which would add more excitement to me in OHMA.
Valerie Fendt (2017)
While working in the technically and physically demanding professions of bicycle messenger, theatrical stagehand, and bookbinder/conservation technician, Valerie Fendt fed her intellectual hunger through literature, film, the study of liberation struggles, and the camaraderie of fellow artists/activists. Since coming to Columbia University, she has been delighted to discover that she could not only build on this non-traditional educational background but also thrive in the academy as a passionate student of history, culture and politics. She graduated summa cum laude in 2017 with departmental honors for her History thesis, “Paradigm Shift: The Standing Rock Sioux and the Struggle of Our Time.”
With the strong belief that creating space for and seeking out marginalized voices helps to facilitate freedom for everyone and enriches the whole of society, Valerie is thrilled to join the Oral History graduate program. She looks forward to developing the skills necessary to gather and present those voices in a way that broadens our collective sense of history and invites new meaning into the public conversation.
Samantha Lombard (2017)
Samantha Lombard is from Massachusetts and graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst Commonwealth Honors College with Bachelor’s degrees in History and Art History in 2016. The research for her senior thesis, Social Media, the Western World, and UNESCO: ISIS and the Destruction of Ancient Art, centered on the relationship between ISIS and Western media, as well the affect of ISIS on ancient Syrian and Iraqi art and architecture. The thesis also discusses the role of oral history in the Yazidi genocide. Samantha plans to focus her Oral History Master of Arts program of study on the potential for oral history in documenting and preventing genocide.
Tomoko Kubota-Hiramoto (2017)
Tomoko Kubota is an oral historian, journalist, and Ph.D student based in Tokyo. As an oral historian, she is passionate about preserving war memories in Japan, and works closely as a consultant with the Okinawa Memories Initiative—where she collaborates with another OHMA alum—and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. She has also been published widely as a freelance journalist, drawing on 16 years of experience as a newscaster and reporter for Tokyo Broadcasting Systems Television, the leading nationwide TV network. Currently she writes “Kubota Tomoko’s Oral History,” a regular column for Newsweek Japan that’s based on her interviews with people all across the country. She is a Ph.D. student at Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies of the University of Tokyo, where she is researching the application of oral history methodologies to family dialogues and connecting people and communities.
Kyna Patel (2017)
Kyna Patel is originally from Lakeland, Florida. She graduated from New College of Florida in 2015 with a B.A. in Anthropology. Her first experience with oral history was in 2013 when she interviewed a third gender community in Bahucharaji, India about religion and gender identity.
Kyna's research interests include race, identity, local history, foreign language, gender, immigration, borders, movement, visual culture, and civil rights. Recently she was an English Teaching Assistant in Germany through the Fulbright Program and was one of several members of the Diversity Group. She is an avid photographer and enjoys reading fiction