Please join us in celebrating the news and accomplishments of our students, alumni, and faculties!

Student Updates

Ariel Urim Chung (2022) was able to start her long-time dream project, The Kitchen Project, on recording stories of diasporic Asian mothers, daughter, and non-binary children on their relationship to food and care! She will also be presenting at the 10th Emerging Symposium on Oral History, Digital Storytelling, and Creative Practice on the project.

Lindsay Szper (2022) and her friends’ language school, Culture Without Borders Language Collective (CWB), is taking root and growing. Their mission is teaching and learning world languages through friendship and shared experiences. They host a weekly online English/Spanish bi+lingual conversation hour on Wednesdays from 8-9pm US east coast time, and they host monthly in-person events in and around New York City. On March 25th, they’re coordinating a bi+lingual English/Spanish tour of an exhibit at the Met on divinity in Maya art - Join them! Email cwblanguagecollective@gmail.com for more information or to join our collective.

News from Our Alumni

Molly Rosner (2008) co-led “Oral History in Interdisciplinary Community College Pedagogy: Centering the Community in the Classroom” to empower faculty to bring oral history interviews into their own pedagogical practices through a series of year-long workshops with the help of a $150,000 NEH grant. The faculty will engage in interviewing, deep listening, and analysis of oral history materials in their disciplines. Through this engagement, the faculty will explore how oral history practices can help re-center their teaching practices to the vantage points of individuals and communities of minority groups whose perspectives are often marginalized in published materials and media. The first of seven faculty seminar meeting will take place in September 2023.

Caiwei Chen (2021) published an article on Wired based on my oral history interviews conducted in the Curating class.

Alissa Rae Funderburk (2017) officially registered The Black Oral Historian Network as a non-profit organization.

Nairy AbdElShafy (2018) co-authored on "Living with Intergenerational Trauma: An Introspective Look Into Palestinian Resilience Building and Well-Being in Egypt." The paper has been accepted to be presented at the 10th Emerging Symposium on Oral History, Digital Storytelling, and Creative Practice in March, 2023 and at the Memory Studies Association (MSA) 7th Annual Conference in July, 2023.

Sach Takayasu (2019) receive the 2022 Brodsky Award for Creative Collaboration for her masters thesis, "Microphones & Brushes: An Exercise in Radical Empathy." Here is a note from Sach: I am grateful to the selection committee, all my advisors (Amy Starecheski, Jessica Benjamin, Francine Spang-Willis, and Tomoko Kubota), my mother, and all my friends who made this possible.

Margie Cook (2016) started a new job at the New York Public Library, Associate Manager of Public Programs (April 2022).

Lynn Lewis (2017) worked full-time on the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project with the help of the NEH/OHA Fellowship, and Lewis’ website will be launched later in 2023, making 50 long form oral history interviews publicly available as well as archival materials and popular education pieces. Lewis also has a collection of oral history interviews with women community organizers and cultural workers coming out on City Lights in August of 2023.

Vanessa K Harper (2021) is [re] launching ethical tours and retreats to Cuba that directly support the Cuban people (an offshoot of her oral history work conducted in Cuba). See video above.

Allison K. Tracy-Taylor (2008) has been hired as the Oral History Archivist for UCSF.

Andrew Viñales (2015) worked with Latino USA and co-produced the episode: Genias in Music: La Lupe.

Cameron Vanderscoff (2013) created and taught an oral history class at UC Santa Cruz, covering oral history, orature, and listening culture.

Nina Zhou (2020) is going to pursue her second master degree in Buddhist Studies in the coming September.

Bridget Bartolini (2018) published "Story of a Street," an article in Urban Omnibus based on her research for her thesis, 34th Avenue Oral History in July 2022. She is made a short film profiling one of the narrators in her thesis project, 34th Avenue Oral History. It will screen at "Together, Not Alone" on Sunday, March 19, 2023, from 3:00-7:00pm at The Local NYC, located at 3-02 44th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens.

Sarah Dziedzic (2009) led by The Oral History Practitioner Worker-led Survey & Solidarity Project has launched its Oral History Worker Survey, which is collecting responses from all cultural workers who engage in oral history work. The survey is part of an independent project supported by an NEH-funded mini-grant awarded to Dziedzic by the Oral History Association. The data collected in this survey will inform a cross-profession advocacy strategy to support oral history workers, in various fields, around pay transparency, career growth, accessibility accommodations, and burnout prevention. All oral history workers are invited to take the survey, which is accepting responses February–March 2023. For more info and to take the survey click here.

Crystal Baik (2009) co-authored "To Write in Unwellness: Documenting A/P/A Voices" in Journal of Asian American Studies V. 25, No. 3 (October 2022): 493-515. If readers want a copy and are hitting a paywall, please email Baik.

Harpal Singh (2020) accepted the position of a Professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Chitkara University, Chandigarh, India, in September 2022. Singh is teaching Histories & Memories to undergraduate students, besides Creative Writing and Communication.

Emma Courtland (2016) received a Writer’s Guild Award for Radio/Audio Documentary for “The War in Jennifer Weiss.”

Benji de la Piedra (2014) is co-chairing the OHA's 2023 annual meeting, which will take place in Baltimore, October 18-21, and focus on the theme of "Oral History As/And Education" along with former OHMA faculty member Zaheer Ali.

Martina Lancia (2021) was admitted for fall 2023 at both Brown University and University of Texas at Austin for a PhD in Italian Studies.

Lance C. Thurner (2008) was hired as a full-time Assistant Teaching Professor in the History Department of Rutgers University, Newark. This is his dream job!

News from Our Faculties

Nicki Pombier (2013) has been working with Temple University's Institute on Disabilities, with a group of artists and community archivists, creating FILE/LIFE, which includes oral history-based responses to the Pennhurst archives and the history of institutionalization in PA. In April, an exhibit three years in the making will open in Philadelphia. FILE/LIFE: We Remember Stories from Pennhurst, is a collaborative, community-led exploration of the Pennhurst archives. Over nearly eight decades, more than 10,600 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities lived at the Pennhurst State School and Hospital outside of Philadelphia. Their lives contain its history. Who are they? What do their stories have to say to us today? Seven archivists (all people with disabilities and/or family members) share stories from the archives that made them listen, feel, imagine, and remember. *Arch Street Meeting House, Philadelphia, PA, April 20-23, 2023 Pennsylvania State Capitol, Harrisburg, PA, June 20-23, 2023

Liza Zapol (2011) says, it is a pleasure to work with Nicki Pombier and teach Serious Play in OHMA, and in 2022 we extended this collaboration with an oral history mini-course in the Yale Public Humanities Program. I co-wrote a screenplay with Annette Leddy which was a finalist for the Sundance Labs and which is currently in development.

The New York Times Magazine did a feature article on the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project. Mary Marshall Clark, Nyssa Chow, and Amy Starecheski were among the co-directors of the project, and the core interviewing team included OHMA alums Bridget Bartolini, Fernanda Espinosa, Nicole JeanBaptiste, Lynn Lewis, Janee Moses, Anahi Naranjo, Sara Sinclair, Liza Zapol, and Carlin Liu Zia.