Spring 2019 Student and Alumni News
As we wrap up the 2018-2019 school year, please join us in celebrating the news and accomplishments of our students and alums!
Student Updates
Eileen Welsome (2018) presented, "Without Consent: The History of Human Radiation Experiments in Rochester, a Family Story" at the University of Rochester, as part of their Human Values in Health Care Annual Lecture in April.
Christina Barba (2017) and her Inter/views exhibit were recently featured in the Mirror Spectator. Click here to check it out!
Holly Werner-Thomas (2017) published in the Oral History Review. Her review of "The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist, and Zulu" by Brian Neve featured in the Spring 2019 edition. Also, the Oral History Archives at Columbia (OHAC) accepted her oral history collection, and "The 40% Project: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America" will be one of the collections OHAC is focusing on in 2019.
Storm Garner’s (2018) work on the Queens Night Market has been featured in Voices of New York. Click here to check it out!
Darold Cuba (2018) was a finalist in the 2019 GSAS Master’s SynThesis Competition. He was also featured in the GSAS blog section “Student Spotlight.”
Nora Waters (2018) presented "Art and Art-Making: The Meticulous Presence of the Encounter" at the Emerging Scholars Symposium on Oral History, Digital Storytelling, and Creative Practice at Concordia University in March.
News from Our Alumni
Erica Fugger (2012) was recently selected as an Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability Fellow at Columbia's Institute for the Study of Human Rights.
Leyla Vural (2014) became an international affiliate of the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal.
Michael Kimm (2018) was accepted into Columbia’s MA in Human Rights for the fall! Michael plans to go on to study human rights law, with a focus on issues related to immigration, anti-Asian violence prevention, voting rights, affirmative action, language access and citizenship.
Lynn Lewis (2017) was recently featured in an article on "Gotham: A blog for scholars of New York City History" about her Picture the Homeless Oral History Project - which The New York Community Trust awarded INCITE a one year grant in order to support. She also spoke about the project at an event at the New School in March, "The Art of Resistance: An Artist's Forum on Race, New Media, Technology, and Place keeping in the Global City."
Mother and daughter alums Rozanne Gooding Silverwood (2016) and Margaret Kaur Gooding (2015) facilitated an oral history workshop entitled "Ahaklo' (Listen to Me): Recording Family Oral Histories" at the 2019 "Dynamic Women of Chickasaw Nation Conference" in Oklahoma on May 2nd and 3rd.
Benji de la Piedra (2014) published in "Literature of the Americas." His article, "ELLISON’S WHITE LIBERAL RHINEHART: THE NEGRO AMERICAN CORE OF BOOK I OF THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING..." explored Ralph Ellison's famous unfinished second novel and the character of McIntyre. Check it out here!
Svetlana Kitto (2009), published an article on The Cut. "Would You Wear a ‘Thank God for Abortion’ T-Shirt?" is a reflective piece based on an interview with the artist who made the shirts.
Robin Miniter (2016) recently moved to Washington, D.C., to launch and produce National Geographic's new podcast "Overheard at National Geographic" where she works on stories about everything from honeybee theft to assassination plots to how dung beetles are helping us develop self-driving car technology. She continues to research and develop episodes for the spooky podcast franchise Lore, and is currently embarking on a podcast project for the oral history branch of the National Park Service with fellow alum, Emma Courtland-Cullens (2016).
Elyse Blennerhasset (2016), in collaboration with nonfiction filmmakers Tirtza Even and Meg McLagan created "Half Truths and Full Lies" depicting through documentation and reenactment, the case of Efrén Paredes Jr. a Latinx man from Michigan who was sentenced to life without parole in 1989 at age fifteen, for a murder he claims he did not commit. Learn more and watch here.
Ellen Coon (2015) facilitated a public workshop for the OHMA Spring Workshop Series entitled “The Mountain with Two Wives: Landscape and Embodied Memory in Kathmandu.”
Xiaoyan Li (2016) taught an oral history class at an elementary school in China. Furthermore, she also recently presented at two oral history conferences in Southern China about projects that she worked on during her time at OHMA and also acted as a translator for international oral historians visiting China.
Fanny Garcia (2016) published her reflections about attending the Families Belong Together rally in NYC, on recording audio during an action, and the interviews she did at the event. Check it out on the Groundswell website.
Lauren Taylor (2008) facilitated a workshop in the OHMA Spring Workshop Series with Voice of Witness’s Dao X. Tran and Cliff Mayotte on the launch of their new book, “Say It Forward: A Guide to Social Justice Storytelling” which Lauren contributed to.
Cameron Vanderscoff (2013) is going on his fourth annual research trip to Okinawa with the Okinawa Memories Initiative this summer, which he co-founded. The Initiative is a historical dialogue project that uses oral history, public history, and documentary practice to bring together voices and build coalitions around popular awareness and knowledge of the Ryukyuan Islands and their overlooked role in the region and the world, including exploring the deeply intertwined Okinawan-American relationship. They are currently working towards launching a new platform featuring multimedia displays of their work.
In October, 2019 during the OHA’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Allison Tracy-Taylor (2008) will become the President of the Association, serving in this role for a year. Since April, 2019, Allison Tracy-Taylor has been working with the California State Library to develop a website that will feature oral histories about the state’s history and heritage, particularly highlighting the diversity of California.
Leonard Cox (2016) is presenting at the 2019 Oral History Association annual conference in Salt Lake City. His presentation, "Deleting Homosexuality," focuses on his oral history interview with Dr. Charles Silverstein and his 40-year career challenging the criteria of social morality as the basis for diagnosing sexual disorders. In 1973, Dr. Silverstein was one of the key forces behind the removal of the word homosexual from the American Psychological Association's list of mental disorders. He has also just started in his new role as Project Manager for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Oral History Project. He will support Mary Marshall Clark in the managing of all details of the project. This will include, the creation of a project design, maintaining close relationships with the leadership of HRC, identifying and scheduling all subjects for the project, interviewing, creating field notes and tracking meta-data, managing the audio/video file through the transcript process, preparing all data for Columbia’s Oral History Archives, and preparing the final report and presentation for the HRC community.
Crystal Mun-hye Baik (2009) (Assistant Professor, Gender & Sexuality Studies, UC Riverside) will be publishing her first book, Reencounters: On the Korean War & Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press, Asian American History and Culture Series) in November 2019. Examining the ramifications of the ongoing Korean War as part of everyday life in Asia, the United States and Europe, Reencounters pulls together a diasporic feminist archive of subversive memory works, including oral history projects, to actualize unruly memories of survival and refusal that exceed US-centered notions of Cold War division and militarized peace.
Sarah Dziedzic (2009) worked with Storm King Art Center to establish their Oral History Program, and conducted the founding collection of interviews with artists in their sculpture collection, including Alice Aycock, Lynda Benglis, John Knight, and Maya Lin, among others. Transcripts and short videos utilizing archival images are available online. You can also check out her recently updated website.
Anna F. Kaplan (2009) completed her PhD in History at American University with a dissertation that studied the creation and uses of memories of the University of Mississippi’s desegregation in 1962. Her dissertation was awarded the Janet Oppenheim Dissertation Prize for a distinguished dissertation in history. For more information, visit her website.
Robert Rauschenberg: An Oral History, edited by Sara Sinclair (2012) with Peter Bearman and Mary Marshall Clark, has been featured in Publishers Weekly.
Andrew Viñales (2015) will be spending about a month this summer in Washington DC as part of the Smithsonian Latino Center's Latino Museum Studies Program. He will be working and making public facing work based on archival material.
Steven Palmer (2014), Brad Bailey (2017), Leonard Cox (2014), and Leyla Vural (2014) conducted almost all of the interviews for the Stonewall Oral History Project. The project is about LGBTQ life in New York before and after Stonewall, even more than it is about the uprising itself, and we interviewed a wide range of New Yorkers to put their experience on the record. The collection of about 80 interviews lives at the LGBT Center’s archives, but also is online.
Check out these additional updated bios to see what our alums have been up to: