Meet our collective members

We are a community of scholars, artists, activists, students, and independent practitioners working in the field of oral history.

  • Hourig Attarian is an Associate Professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia (AUA). She holds a PhD in Education from McGill University. She is also a Core Member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. Visual arts-based methodologies are a core facet of Hourig’s research endeavours. Anchored in the blurred genre of life history and autobiographical inquiry, her work focuses on storying memory and identity through visual and narrative explorations. Her research-creation projects merge creative writing, photo collages, installations and performance, drawing together difficult memories and marginalized histories of violence within a framework of public pedagogy. Hourig teaches education, oral history, and gender studies courses at AUA.

  • lacey is a friend born and raised in Mi’kma’ki / Nova Scotia, and has spent the last couple years building community in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal while completing their undergraduate degree in Community, Public Affairs and Policy Studies and Urban Studies. They are now pursuing a Masters of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Glasgow. With a particular interest in the ethics of knowledge and care practices when collecting and disseminating information, lacey also loves to sit in a park with a good book, bake something delicious for friends, or write letters and postcards to loved ones.

  • Seika Boye is a writer, scholar, educator, and artist whose practices revolve around dance, movement, Blackness, archives and museums, and embodied pedagogies. She is an Assistant Professor and Founder/Director of the Institute for Dance Studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto. Seika received her BFA (Dance and English) and MA (Dance) at York (1999; 2006) and her PhD from the University of Toronto (2016). 

    Between degrees, Seika worked as a professional modern/postmodern dance artist; an archives and publishing assistant at Dance Collection Danse; and a dance writer and editor. She is an advocate for the value of dance and embodied knowledge beyond the scope of performance. 

    Dedicated to public scholarship, Seika curated the award winning archival exhibition It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 (2018) and co-curated with Mona Stonefish, Peter Park, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, Evadne Kelly and Sky Stonefish — Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario (2019) which was the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Heritage Trust Award. In 2018 she received the Toronto District School Board's African Heritage Educators’ Network Arts Honoree (2019). She is the inaugural recipient of Dance Studies Association Dance in the Public Sphere Award (2021). From 2018-19, Seika was an artist-in-residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario where she created the ongoing project This Living Dancer, an archival simulation that explores self-determination and privacy in archiving methodologies.

    Her publications include writing for Canadian Journal of History, TURBA, Dance Chronicle, Canadian Theatre Review, alt.theatre, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Performance Matters, Dance Collection Danse Magazine and The Dance Current. Seika is the co-editor/contributor with Thomas F. DeFrantz of Configurations in Motion: Performance Curation and Communities of Colour, 3rd Edition (2017). She has a forthcoming edited essay collection with MJ Thompson Power Moves:Dance, Culture, Politics (Playwrights Canada Press).

    As a movement dramaturg, Seika has collaborated with artists including Natasha Powell/Holla Jazz, taisha paggett, Syreeta Hector, Mix Mix Dance Collective, Deanna Bowen, Heidi Struass/adelheid dance, and Djanet Sears. Seika is a sought-after speaker and arts consultant with organizations across Canada. From 2018-2023, she worked closely with the CanDance Network, the national network of Dance Presenters. 

    Seika acknowledges the mentorship of Selma Odom, Miriam Adams, Stephen Johnson, and Vivienne Scarlet. She was born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario and has lived for brief periods in Vancouver (1999-2002) and Montreal (2002-2003). Toronto has been home since 2003 where she lives with her husband and their two children.

  • I am a Professor of History at the University of Toronto, Mississauga where my research focuses on modern queer and trans history; oral history; the history and theory of photography; and queer archives. I am the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a SSHRC-funded multi-year public humanities collaboration with community and university partners. Our recently completed oral history project focuses on the history of the Pussy Palace, a Toronto queer women’s and trans bathhouse, including the 2000 police raid. In June 2025 we will begin our next oral history project, a history of drag king culture in Canada and the US. Recent articles in include “Trans Oral History as Trans Care” (with Myrl Beam, in Oral History Review) and “Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ+ Community Archive” (Archivaria). From 2014-2021, I served on the Board of The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBQT2+ Archive, including as Co-President. In general, I am interested in research creation in public oral history work; in ethical and energizing collaboration strategies; and the relationship between oral history and photography.

  • Bio to come.

  • Kelann Currie-Williams (they/she) is a writer, photo-based artist, and oral historian living in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. They are currently a PhD student in the Humanities Program at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture working at the intersections of Visual Culture Studies, History, Black Studies, and Cultural Studies. Kelann's research focuses on the image-making and photographic preservation histories of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Canada from the late 19th to late 20th centuries. Her work has appeared in Urban History Review, Canadian Journal of History, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and Philosophy of Photography. From 2023-2024, Kelann was a scholar-in-residence at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and they are currently the student representative for the centre. Outside of academia, Kelann is a photographer who loves to read and write poetry.

  • Shanna Farrell is an oral historian and writer. She has been an interviewer with UC Berkeley's Oral History Center since 2013, where she works on a wide variety of projects and specializes in community and identity, food and beverage culture, arts and letters, and environmental history. She runs the Oral History Center's educational initiatives and is the producer of their podcast, The Berkeley Remix. She is the author of two books, A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits and Bay Area Cocktails: A History of Culture, Community and Craft. She currently serves on the Oral History Association's council and is a member of the Oral History Review editorial board. She holds a Master's in Oral History from Columbia University and an Interdisciplinary Master's in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University. 

  • I am fascinated by how people consciously and unconsciously narrate their life histories. My academic career has involved the practise and teaching of oral history methodology. My PhD (from University of Essex) was on the Windermere/Kensington community and apartheid forced removals. I have been employed at the Historical Studies Department, University of Cape Town since 1997. My current research involves: (post)colonial oral histories of violence, and debates about trauma theory, memory, and psychoanalysis. I am also interested in parenting styles of trauma survivors, and how the child’s sense of self is intersubjectively framed and anti-referential psychic trauma is constituted across generations.

  • Elena Foulis is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. She has directed the oral history initiative Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio (ONLO) since 2014, an ongoing project that has gathered more than 160 video-recorded narratives. Selected stories from this collection are featured in her iBook, Latin@ Stories Across Ohio.

     

    Foulis’s research centers on Latina/o/e voices and linguistic practices, with particular attention to oral history and performance as modes of knowledge production. She is also the host and producer of the Latin@ Stories podcast, which invites audiences to engage with local Latina/o/x experiences while amplifying the voices of these communities more broadly.

     

    She is the author and co-editor of Working en comunidad: Service-Learning and Community Engagement with U.S. Latinas/os/es (University of Arizona Press, 2024) and Embodied Encuentros: Oral History Archives of Latinas/os/es Experiences (Ohio State University Press, 2026). Foulis is an engaged scholar committed to reaching both academic and non-academic audiences through her writing, presentations, and public humanities projects.

  • Director of Public History at NCSU, Editor of American Studies Journal, Oral History Association- national council member; I consult, write, and co-PI various projects and grants. I do 1960s, Afrofuturism (Trekkie for life!), oral history, black economics past--future & gentrification, and digital humanities. I did HarambeeCity -book & website: harambeecity.lib.miamioh.edu. Currently working on Marcus Garvey's Apothecary, a website supplement to book in progress- Cooking With Black Nationalism.

  • Naomi Frost is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Concordia University. She completed her MA in history at Monash University in Melbourne where she served on the committee for Oral History Victoria. Her current research focuses on the oral histories of 1.5 and second-generation migrants and transgenerational memory and storytelling in the Cambodian post-genocide diaspora in Canada, Australia, and the United States. She was appointed as Concordia University Library’s Researcher-in-Residence for 2023-2024, and is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia University (2024-2025). She also works as a research assistant for the project Cemetery as Metaphor: An Oral History of Montreal’s Back River Memorial Gardens.

  • Marie-Anne Gagnon is the Curator at the MEM – Centre des mémoires montréalaises, Montréal’s museum of memories and local stories. As the head of collections and research, she is responsible for the MEM’s oral history, photography, and artefact collections. She oversees oral history projects, as well as research and historical content for exhibitions. Her work highlights neighbourhood and community stories, local landmarks big and small, family histories, personal memories of the city, and living heritage.

    Marie-Anne trained as a public historian at Carleton University, where her MA research focused on food history: the adoption, appropriation, and transformation of immigrant and Indigenous foods to create a Canadian culinary identity. She then worked as a researcher, oral historian, and cataloguer for various heritage institutions such as Parks Canada and the McCord Museum. Her commitment to oral history deepened when serving as COHDS’s Associate Director in 2017 and as the Centre d’histoire de Montréal’s Oral History Archivist.

    Marie-Anne has had the privilege, as content coordinator and reviewer, of working on the MEM’s public spaces and its permanent exhibition, Montréal, where Montrealers tell the story of their city, from its proud collective moments to its sobering realities. These monumental projects, showcasing dozens of oral-history-based multimedia productions, kept her busy throughout the pandemic until the MEM’s opening in 2023.

    Nowadays, Marie-Anne feeds her love for intangible heritage by reading about culinary history, sharing recipes, contradancing, and playing flute in traditional Irish and Québécois sessions.

  • Creator of the Black Oral Historians Network, 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. Learn more at www.alissaraefunderburk.com.

  • Bio to come

  • I'm a Canadian who now lives in Scotland, where I work in the History program at the University of Glasgow. I'm a fairly dedicated oral historian, and work mostly in rural Rwanda, which I love. I don't really know how I ended up working in UK academia, but I'm grateful to have found work in such a beautiful part of the world, and that allows me to spend time listening to people talk about their lives and histories. Beyond work, I try to spend time in the wilderness or failing that, with the furry beasts who increasingly invade my home (my partner and I have four now), making it the best kind of sanctuary in an otherwise busy life.

  • Dr Nēpia Mahuika is an Indigenous Ngāti Porou – “Māori” - scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. He is an Associate Professor in History at Massey University and has been a longstanding co-chair and member of Te Pouhere Kōrero (NZ Māori Historians collective). Nēpia served two consecutive terms as president of the National Oral History Association of New Zealand (2016-2020) and was as “Oceanic rep” on the IOHA Council (2021-2024). His most referenced work Rethinking Oral History and Tradition (OUP, 2019) won an OHA award in 2020, and inspired his current project - a co-edited collection on Global Indigenous Oral History Methods and Ethics (forthcoming 2025). Dr Mahuika was also an expert adviser to the national History curriculum reset in all New Zealand schools (2020-2023) and is currently leading a Marsden project (2022-2025) on Indigenous history pedagogies, methods, questions, sources and ethics for educators at all levels in Aotearoa NZ.

  • Molly Merryman is an Associate Professor in the School of Peace and Conflict Studies at Kent State University, where she has been a leader in establishing gender and sexuality programs, curriculum, and centers, including the oldest LGBTQ+ Studies program in Ohio. She is an oral historian, documentary/ethnographic filmmaker, and cultural historian whose scholarship explores societal marginalization, with a particular focus on gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and race. Merryman is also research director for Queer Britain, the UK’s national LGBT+ museum; before the museum had physical space, she established Virtually Queer, the museum’s video-based oral history collection/online exhibition space, creating the QB’s first exhibition about trans/cis queers women’s activisms. Merryman is currently working with Cara-Friend, Northern Ireland’s oldest LGBTQ+ rights and advocacy organization, leading a visual oral history project that explores how 50 years of LGBTQ+ rights and activism is connected to the Troubles and peacebuilding.

  • I’m an oral and public historian, artist, and writer, based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), telling and listening to stories about immigration, identity, collective memory, food, and folklore, particularly in relation to the Italian-Canadian experience and traditions from my family's region, Molise. In 2019, I completed my Master’s in Public History at Carleton University. My research project, The Yellow Line: Italo-Canadian Oral Histories from Montreal's Backyards and Schoolyards, was an archival photo, installation, and oral history pop-up exhibit, presented at the Casa d’Italia in March 2019. My latest project was an oral history cookbook on the stories and recipes of Montreal's molisani, Dalla valigia alla tavola: A journey through Molisan culinary heritage, which I completed in 2023 in collaboration with the Federazione delle associazioni molisane del Quebec, photographer and artist Vee Di Gregorio, chef Joseph D'Alleva, and pastry chef Erica Marsillo. Currently, I am pursuing my PhD at Concordia University on the development of Italian-Canadian cuisine and food identity in Montreal.

    In my spare time, I publish two newsletters, Crivello and notyrgirls, which is co-authored with Jac Di Bartolomeo; make art; dance tango; and read tarot. You can learn more about my projects at artistorian.com and connect with me on Instagram at theartistorian.

  • Ana Milić (she/they) is currently pursuing a PhD in Education at McGill University. She holds a master’s degree from Concordia University’s Individualized Program in Social Sciences. Her research centers oral histories of queer migrants from former Yugoslavia, seeking to understand the affective and political legacies of post-socialist and post-conflict transitions, and the reconstitution of queer identity in diaspora. She explores how these conditions shape belonging across diasporic queer and feminist lives in settler-colonial context.

     

    Ana’s scholarship is informed by her own anti-war activism during the Yugoslav wars of the 90s, her lived experience as a post-Yugoslav queer migrant, and her ongoing search for home. Her work engages with queer political imagination and the role of affect and memory in shaping imaginaries of home and refuge. She is currently exploring creative and embodied approaches to oral history and how listening and storytelling can function as a form of pedagogy, one that embraces affect, uncertainty, and the knowledge that lives within us but has yet to be fully confronted and articulated.

  • Kathryn Nasstrom is an oral historian, writer, editor, and Professor Emerita of History at the University of San Francisco in the United States. Her publications include Everybody’s Grandmother and Nobody’s Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice. She is a past editor of the Oral History Review and a founding series editor for Oxford University Press’s oral history book series. Working within the interdisciplinary fields of oral history, life history research, and autobiographical studies, she brings textual research methods to bear on oral historical analysis.

  • I grew up bilingual in a cosmopolitan environment in Istanbul. I left on a scholarship to study cultural anthropology in the US. I discovered oral history while conducting ethnographic fieldwork with pastoral nomads in the mountains of Turkey's Mediterranean region. After completing my PhD at Cornell, I returned to Turkey to teach at Bogazici, Koc and Sabanci universities. My areas of interest include oral history, memory studies, youth culture, nationalism and minorities, migration and diaspora, qualitative research methods, and creative nonfiction. In 2019 I was forced to leave Turkey for political reasons and moved to Glasgow University. I am currently conducting research for an AHRC funded project, Archives of Solidarity: Precarity, Creativity and Shared Future-making Across Closed Borders.  I and members of the research team are conducting oral history interviews with activists and refugees in the border regions of the UK and Turkey.

  • I grew up ethnic, working class and that has imprinted on my entire life, giving me an experiential insight into the lives of the poor and working classes, people marginalized by the outside world but vibrant inside their own communities. It was a storytelling family. I was lucky to get scholarships to study at a great university and then in France and finally for my PhD. I discovered folklore, public history and oral history as disciplines. I am interested in questions of power and the production of history and in how the voices of those people marginalized by mainstream society are expressed. What impact would it have on our understanding of the past, on society today and on their lives if their voices were amplified? I am especially interested in the history of women and in being an advocate for women's rights. I've written about memory, narratives of resistance, commemorative landscapes, power and the production of history, gendered and racialized landscapes, and about teaching to listen. For a long time I taught graduate seminars in oral and public history and involved students with community engaged projects, often with refugees and immigrants, with people of color, with women. I have directed oral history projects and actively co-create oral histories myself. I have recently started consulting, giving talks, workshops, and advising on community engaged projects. The Oral History Association is important to me and I serve as the Chair of the International Committee. I am also very involved in the International Oral History Association where I have been a Council member since 2016 and oversee the international travel scholarships. I am working on an oral history about how women's lives would change if they could walk safely in cities, anytime, anywhere and am almost finished with my book that describes teaching oral history through the listening exercises I created.

  • Carla Pascoe Leahy is an Australian oral historian whose research explores childhood, parenthood and family, as well as place and environmental stories. She resides on Wadawurrung Country on the coastline of Victoria, a place with a strong sense of community and close proximity to beaches, rivers and bushland. When she is not interviewing, Carla loves immersing herself in nature with her family and rambunctious dog!

  • Nicki Pombieris an oral historian, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores the intersections of oral history and the arts, with a focus on collaborations across ability and oral history beyond speech. She teaches in Columbia University’s Oral History MA Program with Liza Zapol, where their course, Serious Play, imagines oral history as an embodied, creative practice—engaging movement, sensory memory, literature and performance. Pombier is a long-time collaborator with Media Arts & Culture at Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities, most recently on File/Life: We Remember Stories of Pennhurst, a community-led exploration of the archives of Pennhurst State School and Hospital culminating in a multi-media installation that won the 2024 Kimmel Family Experience Award for accessibility, and was recognized with Honorable Mentions from the National Council on Public History (2024 Outstanding Public History Project Awards), and from the Disability History Association (2024 Public History Awards.) She is a collaborating artist with Nichole Canuso | Branching Paths, a care-centered art-making company “rooted in choreography and based in the body and the breath,” where Pombier’s dramaturgical contributions draw on more than a decade of work supporting artists working in, on, and with water, as the Founding Editor of Underwater New York (2009-current) and an organizing member of Works on Water (2018-2021.) She is currently writing a memoir, Mother Tongue, exploring the metamorphosis made possible through her relationship with her son, who has Autism, Down syndrome and hearing loss. Pombier is a member of the Pennsylvania Disability History Collaborative, inaugurated in May 2025. A recipient of the 2020-2021 Distinguished University Teaching Award from The New School, she shares more of her work at https://nickipombier.com/.

  • Kay moved to Montreal, from France, to study Oral History at Concordia with their amazing supervisor (Dr. Anna Sheftel). After a successful M.A. in the department of History, centered on the ExisTransInter--a yearly Trans and Intersex March that started in Paris in 1997--Kay found her passion: Oral History of Activism. They decided to keep studying activist practices through a Ph.D. dedicated to Jewish Leftist trajectories in Montreal, after the quiet revolution. In her spare time, Kay is a lover of cats, a brioche specialist, and a tentative artist.

  • Anisa Puri is an oral historian living on unceded Boonwurrung Country in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently leading the Identifying Precarious Victorian Oral History Collections Project in her role as a Research Project Manager at the Language Data Commons of Australia at the Australian National University. She also works as an Oral History Interviewer for the National Library of Australia.

    Anisa has managed and worked as a researcher and interviewer on several large-scale oral history projects in Australia over the last 15 years. Anisa’s the co-author of Australian Lives: An Intimate History (2017, with Alistair Thomson), a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Studies in Oral History, and a past President of Oral History New South Wales. Her doctoral research used archived oral histories to research youth migration to Australia after the Second World War. She is passionate about all things oral history, including listening to peoples’ stories, co-creating interviews, oral history ethics, creating and sustainably archiving new collections, and developing oral history work designed for public audiences.

  • Désirée Rochat is a Haitian-Swiss community worker and educator who has had the chance to learn from Montreal/ Tiohtià:ke youth and other community workers over years of organizing across the city. She is interested in discovering, preserving, and telling plural (hi)stories of Black community activism. Involved in numerous projects for the preservation and promotion of archives of Black community-based organizations, she constantly navigates communities, institutions, disciplines and languages. She also enjoys dancing in her kitchen while baking; long walks in and outside the city; and being constantly amazed by the people that surround her.

  • Hi! My name is Hana Sherafati Zanganeh (she/her). I recently graduated from Concordia University with a double major in Political Science and Community, Public Affairs, and Policy Studies. Born in Iran and raised between Toronto, Tehran, and eventually Montreal, my lived experience has shaped my enduring passion for community, activism, inclusion, and governance.

    Although I have worked several jobs and completed various projects, two in particular have deeply shaped my path. For the past three years, I’ve been working as a caseworker at The Refugee Centre, where I support asylum seekers and refugee claimants through the integration process. As a first-generation immigrant woman, I’ve experienced the complexities of migration firsthand, a perspective that continues to inform both my academic interests and professional goals. In addition, from May 2024 to June 2025, I collaborated with Dr. Anna Sheftel on a research and oral history project marking the 45th anniversary of Concordia’s School of Community and Public Affairs. We gathered archival material, conducted interviews, and co-organized a public exhibition and panel that reflected on the school’s legacy and future.


    This fall, I will begin my master’s in Political Science at McGill University, where I hope to study the impact of transnational activism on integration, particularly in the context of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and Iranian women. I’m especially interested in how contentious politics and diasporic identities shape experiences of inclusion, resistance, and belonging. I hope to explore these questions by conducting oral history interviews with Iranian-Canadian women, and through this work, contribute to building more inclusive and equitable societies.

  • Anna Sheftel is Principal and Professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University in Tiohtiá:ke / Montréal. She is also the mom of three kids, including twins, and thinks that keeping twins alive for this long is more impressive than any professional accomplishment. She loves talking about oral history, memory and what it means to listen to people. She spends a lot of her time dealing with bureaucracy and how it is used as a faceless excuse to never make meaningful change.

  • Romy Shoam is pursuing a Master of Arts in Public History at Carleton University. Her research interests lie in oral history, immigration history, and gender history. Romy has collaborated on oral history projects related to student activism, LGBTQ+ history, and migration to Montreal. Her undergraduate studies in Community, Public Affairs and Policy Studies and Women’s Studies have informed her community-engaged, feminist approach to oral history interviewing. Romy’s M.A. research focuses on oral histories of French-speaking Jewish immigrants to Quebec in the mid-20th century.

  • I have been involved in oral history for five decades, starting with Martha Ross’s oral history course at the University of Maryland in 1974 and most recently as interviewer for the Maryland Lynching Truth, Racial Healing, & Transformation Oral History Initiative (2023). I have been involved in the US Oral History Association for almost as long, including service as president in 1998-9, membership on task forces updating the association’s Principles and Standards for Oral History, appointed cochair of the inaugural Committee on Committees, and membership on the Local Arrangements Committee for the 2023 annual meeting in Baltimore.  I have written widely in the field, coedited Oral History in Public Memories (2008), and served as founding coeditor of Palgrave’s Studies in Oral History series (2001-13). I have taught oral history in contexts ranging from two-hour community-based workshops to fifteen-week graduate seminars. I am committed to a client/community-based practice, negotiate sometimes competing ethical principles, and am moved and enlivened by narrative voices often drowned out by our noisy, shallow, media-driven culture.

  • Francine D. Spang-Willis is a Northern Cheyenne Nation citizen and of Pawnee and settler descent, who holds an MA in Oral History from Columbia University; her research on the Pablo-Allard Bison Herd was recognized as a thesis of exceptional distinction. She is the CEO of Appearing Flying Woman Consulting, based in Bozeman, Montana. She consults and lectures widely on community and land-based oral history and museum projects. Spang-Willis will serve as a faculty member in the Oral History MA program at Columbia University starting in September 2025. She was an Emerson Collective Fellow, and an editorial supervisor and project fellow for Columbia University’s Obama Presidential Oral History project. She served as the co-founder and director of the Western Heritage Center’s American Indian Tribal Histories Project.

  • I was born and raised in the Toronto area on lands presently stewarded by the Mississauga Nishnaabeg and protected by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant. My ancestors were settlers on those lands, starting in the late 18th century. I now live on lands stewarded by Nipissing First Nation and protected by the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850. I am grateful to be a mother, partner, friend, and historian in this beautiful place.

    I studied history at the University of Toronto, receiving my Ph.D. in 2005 for an oral history-based project that focused on the lives of young working women during the Great Depression in Toronto. I moved to this territory in 2005 for a job as a historian at Nipissing University. Since 2010, Glenna Beaucage (Nishnaabekwe, Nipissing First Nation; pictured with me here at LAC in November 2022) and I have been working together to learn from and share the histories of these lands in ways that centre Nbisiing Nishnaabeg ways of understanding the past.

  • Alisha Stranges is a Research Associate in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She is a public humanities scholar and multi-modal artist whose work bridges oral history, performance, and digital research creation. Stranges holds an M.A. in Women & Gender Studies from the University of Toronto, with a collaborative specialization in Sexual Diversity Studies (2020). She serves as Research Manager and Project Oral Historian for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI: Elspeth Brown)—currently focused on completing the Pussy Palace Oral History Project—and as Digital Research Creation Specialist for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative.

    Before entering academia, she earned a Diploma in Theatre Performance from Humber College (2006) and spent a decade devising original plays within Toronto’s queer, independent theatre community. From 2010 to 2015, she returned annually to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre as a teaching-artist and co-facilitator for PrideCab, an intensive training program in collective creation and performance for queer, trans, and gender variant youth. In 2019, she launched the Qu(e)erying Religion anti-Archive Project, which blends elements of oral history with the art of whiteboard animation to document over a decade of supportive programming for life-giving queer spirituality at the University of Toronto.

  • I have been working in oral history at Columbia for 28 years, and my disciplinary training is as a cultural anthropologist. Teaching and mentoring are at the heart of my practice as an oral historian. I live in Mott Haven, in the South Bronx, in an apartment I have lived in for 4 years, in a building with my sister and some chosen family. I am married to a historian and have a 13 year old child and two beloved little dogs. I love NYC and cooking and walking and swimming in rivers and drinking beer and reading novels. I love thinking about the power dynamics of knowledge production and expertise and the intersections of history, property and value in cities/land. Before I was an oral historian I thought maybe I would be a daycare worker, or a civil rights lawyer fighting for the rights of teens, or an ecologist, or a science writer, or a community organizer, or a farmer, or an English teacher (in that order). You can read my official, third person bio here.

  • Liz Strong is an oral historian at Incite Institute at Columbia University. She currently manages the Global Fight for Democracy oral history project and previously managed the Obama Presidency Oral History. Prior to joining Incite in 2019, she spent two years as Project Coordinator for the Muslims in Brooklyn Public History Project at the Center for Brooklyn History (formerly Brooklyn Historical Society). From 2015 to 2019, Liz was the Oral History Program Manager for the New York Preservation Archive Project (NYPAP), where she led several oral history initiatives on the history of the preservation movement in New York City. As a freelance oral historian and personal historian, from 2010 to 2015, she worked with a variety of clients, including the Washington Department of Commerce in 2013 and the University of Arizona Steward Observatory in 2012. She is a member of the Oral History Association's (OHA) task force on Oral History and the Law; she was a founding co-chair of the OHA Advocacy Committee; and she was a member of the 2018 OHA task force on Principles & Best Practices. Liz received an MA in Oral History from Columbia in 2015 and a BA in Narrative Arts from Oberlin College in 2009.

  • Amy Tooth Murphy is a queer oral historian, in all senses of that phrase. She is Senior Lecturer in Oral History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Trustee of the Oral History Society. Her research interests include modern lesbian history, butch identity, oral history theory and method, and queer temporalities. She believes passionately in the power of oral history to foster understanding, of each other and of ourselves. She is a Tintin devotee and dedicates significant time to mastering his hairstyle. She loves being outside, going on adventures with her family, and running really far.

  • Bio to come.

  • I've just retired from university work after 32 years as a lecturer at universities in England and Australia, and have gone back to what I was doing before that - and always wanted to do - which is freelancing as an oral historian ... with the added pleasure that i have time for grandparenting, gardening, wildlife work. I'm very lucky. I did my first oral history interview with my grandmother in 1979, and since than have done oral history work about postwar migration, war service and repatriation, family life and parenting. In England from 1983 I was active in Brighton's QueenSpark community history group (it's still going after 50 years), started teaching oral history through university adult education, and loved my role as a co-editor of the British Oral History journal. I was also lucky to be involved in the foundation of the International Oral History Association, including a stint as President. Back in Melbourne since 2007 I taught oral history and public history through Monash University and, increasingly, teach courses through Oral History Victoria. I've written a fair bit about oral history, but I still find writing a painful process (I've learnt a few tricks that help me through). I'm still nervous before every new oral history interview, but it's still a joy in my life. https://althomsonoralhistory.com.au/

  • Oral history is, to me, a small “d” democratic exercise. The very act of listening attentively to people, be they what Studs Terkel called “the etceteras” or leaders in their fields, recognizes that we’re all makers of history with something worthwhile to share. One of the things I love about oral history is that it’s communal. By definition, you can’t work alone if your work is about listening to people. In this way, oral history mirrors all efforts at social change and, of course, life itself. It’s not only better with other people, it’s impossible without them. 

    I have interviewed one of the scientists who took decades to unpack how the circadian rhythm works, a sculptor whose works in steel are so intricate some take “forever” to make, a lifelong community activist who cofounded New York’s first Caribbean American newspaper more than 40 years ago (and it’s still going), and the owner of a seaweed bathhouse on the West Coast of Ireland where time is so unhurried, there are no appointments. You just show up, wait your turn, and sit in a hot tub of fresh seawater and seaweed for as long as you like. When it comes to listening, in oral history, we’re in no rush either.

  • Alan Wong holds an individualized PhD from Concordia University, where he completed a dissertation on producing belongingness through disidentificatory acts by collecting and analyzing oral histories of Indigenous and racialized gender-diverse activists in Montreal. He was a key collaborator in the SSHRC-funded Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Other Human Rights Violations (2007-2012). His most widely cited article, “Conversations for the Real World: Shared Authority, Reflexivity, and Process in the Oral History Interview,” appeared in the Journal of Canadian Studies (2009). He later received SSHRC funding (2016) to coordinate “Discomfort Zones: Negotiating Tensions and Cultivating Belonging in Diverse College Classrooms in Quebec,” a symposium at Vanier College, where he also teaches in the English Department and coordinates the Women’s and Gender Studies Major. He is a core member of Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.

  • Liza Zapol is a writer and oral historian, with a focus on embodied memory and performance. She teaches in the Oral History Program at Columbia University, and has co-created a course entitled Serious Play: Oral History and the Art of the Story with Nicki Pombier, a course which their students say is “magical,” “changed my life,” and “is the way I survived Columbia.” She is also the Director of the Pedagogy of Listening Lab at Columbia University. She has also taught at Yale, the New School, and led workshops on oral history in preschools, senior centers, and many venues for folks in the ages between. 

    Zapol specializes in oral histories of artists and always wants to learn more about the creative process. She managed the Oral History Program for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; she has worked closely with the Whitney Museum, Skowhegan, Hauser & Wirth, and many other art institutions. This has led her to writing biopics about women artists; she has two feature films in development. Liza thrives in collaboration and loves to dream up new projects. 

  • Stacey Zembrzycki is a precariously employed oral and public historian who has taught in the History and Classics Department at Dawson College since 2013. Despite the fact that she has never been “paid” to practice these crafts, and should probably just call it quits, she can’t escape the allure of people’s stories. Stacey spent a lot of time with her storytelling Baba as a child, and so she blames her for what has, in the words of her husband, become an "expensive hobby." Seriously though, she loves the rush of being in the field, listening to stories, building relationships, and thinking about how best to share narratives with different audiences. She also enjoys getting lost in her thoughts about process and how experiences in the field equate to learning that not just pushes oral history forward, but also makes her a better human being. Beyond her beloved practice, Stacey is devoted to her husband Rob, their daughter Liliya (almost 9), and Maggie Mae, their incredibly vocal 12-year-old German Shorthaired Pointer with zero chill. They split their time between Montreal and their early twentieth century cottage in northern Vermont, a place that brings all of them a deep sense of solace and peace.

  • Dr. Monica Eileen Patterson is an Associate Professor of Childhood and Youth Studies and Assistant Director of Curatorial Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and History, and a certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. Patterson is author of several articles and co-editor of two books: Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline (University of Michigan Press, 2011). 

    She is interested in the knowledge and perspectives of children and the possibilities for including children in oral history research as interviewees, interviewers, and co-researchers, and the ways in which they are represented and engaged in contemporary public spheres. 

    Currently, she is completing an edited volume on Children’s Museology to be published in Routledge’s Museum Meanings series. Her latest project, “A New, Critical Children’s Museology” identifies and develops approaches to co-creating exhibitions not just for or about children, but by and with children across the globe. It explores how children can change museums, curatorial practice, and their communities via active participation and exhibit co-creation. 

    As a curator, scholar, and activist, Patterson is interested in the potential for collaborating with and learning from children through oral history projects to help forge a more just world for all.

  • Crystal Mun-hye Baik is a feminist memory worker, educator, and writer currently located in the unceded lands of the Tongva/Kizh people. She teaches in the Gender and Sexuality Studies department at UC Riverside. Crystal is a part of the Korean diaspora and still hopes to visit her grandparents' homes in the northern half of the Korean peninsula. Crystal is also a life partner, a comrade, a caregiver, a dog mama, a sister, and a daughter.