OHA Leadership

Stephen Sloan is the Executive Director of the Oral History Association, Director of the Institute for Oral History, and a Professor of History at Baylor University. The Institute recently received the Governor’s Award for Historic Preservation, the highest designation for such work in the state. He is a past president of the OHA and has chaired and served on a host of association committees. Stephen has won numerous awards for his projects, publications, and preservation efforts using oral history. His most recent publication is the co-edited anthology Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe and has a co-authored book coming out soon on remote oral history practice, Oral History at a Distance.

Email: oha@oralhistory.org

Steven Sielaff is Senior Editor & Collections Manager at the Baylor University Institute for Oral History in Waco, Texas. During the last ten years Steven has held positions at Baylor ranging from graduate assistant to senior lecturer, working on various web-based and multimedia projects, including For the Greater Good: Philanthropy in Waco, the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission’s Texas Liberators & Survivors of Genocide projects, and War Comes to Waco, A WWI digital exhibit. Steven has also conducted many institutional oral histories, including series on both the Dr Pepper Museum and Baylor’s Mayborn Museum Complex, as well as a forty-interview series on the history of Baylor University. In his supervisory role at Baylor he oversees every technical aspect of processing, preserving, and disseminating the Institute’s oral history collection of over 7000 interviews. He also directs the digitization of its analog collection and spearheads the migration of transcripts and audio files to the institute’s searchable online database powered by Quartex.Steven serves as project lead for the Texas Oral History Locator Database (TOLD), is Editor-in-Chief of the Texas Oral History Association’s annual journal, Sound Historian, and is Managing Editor for the H-OralHist listserv.

Email: oha@oralhistory.org

Hailey Rowe serves as the current Program Associate for the Oral History Association. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte in Middle Grades Education and holds a master’s degree in information science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Hailey has taught 6th and 7th grade math and English in both public and private school environments and has worked as an Education Coordinator for the O. Winston Link and Roanoke History Museum in Roanoke, Virginia.

Email: oha@oralhistory.org

Chiara Osborne is the graduate assistant for the Oral History Association and pursuing a Master of Arts in Museum Studies at Baylor University. She holds a Bachelor of Science/Bachelor of Arts in Dance Studies as well as Museums, Archives & Public History from Nazareth University. Her current thesis research focuses on the relationship between dance and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) institutions, aiming to shed light on the role of movement in redefining our thinking of these spaces.

Email: oha@oralhistory.org

Since June 2007, Troy Reeves has been the Oral Historian at the UW-Madison Archives & Records Management. In this role, Reeves has overseen the key components of managing an oral history program—collecting and curating oral history recordings, as well as communicating and collaborating with interested individuals about the art and science of oral history. He, too, has managed or facilitated dozens of oral history projects in Wisconsin, including “Madison LGBTQ Community, 1960s-Present,” “Women@UW/Women Inspire,” and “African-American Athletes at UW.” Along with these projects, Reeves has held leadership roles in the Oral History Association, currently serving as its VP.

Email: troy.reeves@wisc.edu

Sarah Milligan is a Professor and Head of the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program (OOHRP) at the Oklahoma State University Library, where she holds the Hyle Family Endowed Professorship and oversees the production, access, and preservation of the 2,000+ interviews in the OOHRP collection. Since joining the field in 2005, she has worked extensively in oral history outreach, including training for new interview production as well as technical assistance to oral history collection holders nationally. Before joining the OOHRP, Milligan was administrator of the Kentucky Oral History Commission, managing an archive of 10,000+ oral history recordings, a statewide oral history granting program, and an extensive outreach network. She has also worked as a folklife specialist for the Kentucky Folklife Program, producing and mentoring ethnographic fieldwork, and part of the administrative team for the Kentucky Folklife Festival. Milligan has provided leadership in various roles in related fields, including serving as inaugural president for the Oklahoma Archivists Association and chair of the Board of Trustees for Oklahoma Humanities. Milligan has served on numerous OHA committees, including co-chairing the 2018 task force to revise the longstanding OHA Principles and Best Practices and serving on the OHA Council (2018-2022).

Email: sarah.milligan@okstate.edu

Mark Cave is Senior Historian with The Historic New Orleans Collection. He created the oral history program at HNOC and developed oral history responses following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in 2010, and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 as well as the New Orleans Life Story Project and other smaller thematic projects. He has served on numerous OHA committees and is a past President of the International Oral History Association. He is co-editor of Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis and Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe. He is currently co-editing the forthcoming Global Handbook of Oral History.

Email: markc@hnoc.org

Museum Specialist, Oral History Initiative
Office of Digital Strategy and Engagement
Smithsonian, National Museum of African American History and Culture
MRC 1403, 1400 Constitution Ave NW
Washington, DC 20560

Email: naviesk@si.edu

Professor and Director of Public History at North Carolina State University
Department of American Studies and History
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS. 66045

Email: nfrazie2@ncsu.edu

Shanna Farrell is an oral historian, writer, and audio producer. She has worked as an interviewer for the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley since 2013, where she specializes in food and beverage culture, environmental history, and art and literature. She is the author of two books, A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits and Bay Area Cocktails: A History of Community, Culture and Craft, and produces The Berkeley Remix podcast. She was the co-chair for the 2020 Oral History Association Conference and helped organize the 2022 symposium on Assessing the Role of Race and Power in Oral History Theory and Practice. She also serves on the Oral History Review Editorial Board.

Email: sfarrell@library.berkeley.edu

Francine D. Spang-Willis is of Cheyenne, Pawnee, and settler descent. She is an oral historian, educator, strategist, and researcher based in Bozeman, Montana. As the founder of Appearing Flying Woman Consulting, she collaborates with diverse organizations, communities, and individuals to create and implement community-centered oral history projects.

Spang-Willis is an Emerson Collective Fellow in the Community Champions cohort. She was an Obama Presidency Oral History Project Fellow from 2019 to 2020 and a supervisor of the editorial team from 2021 to 2022. She serves as an elected member of the Oral History Association Council.

Spang-Willis earned an M.A. from Columbia University in 2021. Her award-winning thesis, Becoming Wild Again in America: The Restoration and Resurgence of the Pablo-Allard Bison Herd, is a website and three-part podcast. She also has an M.A. in Native American Studies from Montana State University and a B.S. in Business Management from Rocky Mountain College.

Email: aperkiss@gmail.com

Dr. Anna Sheftel is Principal and Associate Professor in the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University. She has done oral history projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with Holocaust survivors in Montreal, with student activists, and she is currently working on a project about a strange but significant little Jewish cemetery in Montreal. She co-created Refugee Boulevard: Making Montreal Home After the Holocaust, a collaborative audio tour which won both the 2020 Oral History Association (OHA) and Canadian Historical Association (CHA) Digital and Public History prizes. She has also published extensively on oral history practice, ethics and pedagogy, most notably Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), co-edited with Stacey Zembrzycki, which won the OHA’s 2014 Book Award, and her article, “Talking and Not Talking about Violence: Challenges in Interviewing Survivors of Atrocity as Whole People,” won the OHA’s 2019 Article Award.

Email: Anna.sheftel@concordia.ca

Abigail Perkiss is a Professor of History at Kean University, where her research and teaching focus on oral history, historical memory, and the recent past. She is the author of several books, including Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore and Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Post-WWII Philadelphia. Currently, she is working on a book and podcast about the memory of the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. To date, she has collected more than thirty oral history interviews with the journalists, photographers, editors, and mediamakers who covered MOVE. From 2015-2020, she served as vice president of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region; from 2015-2023, she was a member of the editorial team of the Oral History Review, in roles ranging from pedagogy editor to managing editor to co-editor.

Email: aperkiss@gmail.com

Mary Kay Quinlan, Ph.D., is associate dean emerita of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she taught journalism and oral history classes for nearly 20 years. She has edited the OHA Newsletter since 1993.

Before turning to academia, she spent 15 years as a Washington correspondent for the Omaha World-Herald and Gannett News Service, during which time she served as National Press Club president.

Quinlan is a frequent oral history workshop presenter and is co-author of several oral history publications, including Indigenous Oral History Manual: Canada and the United States and The Oral History Manual, 4^th edition (forthcoming).

Email: ohaeditor@gmail.com

Holly Werner-Thomas is an oral history consultant and independent scholar. She created “The 40% Project: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America,” which is archived with the Oral History Archives at Columbia University. Her documentary play, The Survivors, which is based on the interviews, won Columbia University’s Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award in 2020 for unique and innovative contributions to oral history theory and practice. Holly was cochair of the virtual June 2022 symposium, “Assessing Race and Power in Oral History Theory and Practice,” cosponsored by the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley and the Oral History Association. In 2022, she also published two articles in the Oral History Review, “Sensory Roadmaps: How to Capture Sensory Detail in an Interview and Why Doing So Has Exciting Implications for Oral History,” and “Is Oral History White? The Civil Rights Movement in Baltimore, an Oral History Project from 1976, and Best Practices Today”. Finally, Holly also works as an oral history consultant. Recent clients include the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Vaccine Research Center & National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, the Lemeslon-MIT Project, the Vera Institute of Justice, the National Women’s Law Center, and Save the Whales.

Email: holly@hollythomasoralhistory.com

Molly Todd is an historian specializing in Central America, refugees, transnational activism, and historical memory. Her publications include Long Journey to Justice: El Salvador, The United States; Struggles against Empire and Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021 and 2010); and, with Jason Cohen, Activist Scholarship in the Public Humanities (forthcoming). Since the late 1990s, Todd has been an “embedded historian” with US-El Salvador Sister Cities, a transnational network connecting Salvadorans displaced by violence and US-based solidarity activists. With her partners, she coordinates Proyecto Solidaridad / Project Solidarity, a public humanities initiative involving archive-building, oral history, interactive events, and publications. In connection with this work, Todd was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2022-23 and a Public Engagement Fellow with the Whiting Foundation in 2018-19. Todd is Professor at Montana State University, where she directs the Public History Lab and teaches courses in historical methods and Latin American history.

Email: managingeditorohr@gmail.com

Sharon D. Raynor is the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Winnie Wood Endowed Professor of English and Digital Media at Elizabeth City State University. She is the co-editor of Teaching Race in Perilous Times (SUNY, 2021) and Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans (Routledge, 2022).  She is also the executive producer for the documentary film, In the Face of Adversity: The Service and Legacy of African American WWII Veterans for the North Carolina African American Veterans Lineage Day Documentary Project in collaboration with the NC Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. She is the creator of the website, When Writing Goes to War: Stories from Black Vietnam Veterans of North Carolina (www.whenwritinggoestowar.com). Raynor is a North Carolina native with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Master of Art in Multicultural Literature from East Carolina University and a PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Email: ohrbookrevieweditor@gmail.com

A native of Philadelphia, Bud Kliment received his MA in Oral History from Columbia University in 2019.  He has worked regularly as a writer, specializing in music and the other performing arts.   A frequent contributor to the Oral History Review, he also has published young adult biographies of Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald.  At Columbia, he works with the Pulitzer Prize Board, helping to organize the annual awards in journalism, books, drama and music.  Years ago he ran a record store.

He is particularly interested in oral histories that preserve collaborative artistic activities (including theater and film as well as music), oral biographies, and the technological roots of oral history. 

Email: OHRMedia@outlook.com

Robert LaRose is a Digital Curation Librarian in The People’s Archive at DC Public Library. His work mainly focuses on preserving and providing access to the library’s digitized and born-digital archival collections. These primarily include oral histories, photographs, newspapers, audiovisual recordings, and websites documenting DC history and culture. In partnership with the Humanities Council of Washington, DC (HumanitiesDC), he manages the description, preservation, and access for dozens of oral histories created through the DC Oral History Collaborative. A firm believer in making digitization and personal archiving more accessible, Robert has produced instruction guides, podcasts, and programs on these topics for hundreds of library patrons and staff. Before joining The People’s Archive, he managed DC Public Library’s Memory Lab, a free do-it-yourself digitization space. Additionally, he has collaborated with colleagues at DCPL and neighboring institutions to train members of the IMLS-funded Memory Lab Network on establishing their own digitization spaces. He is honored and excited to be joining the OHR’s editorial team!

Email: copyeditorohr@gmail.com

Nairy AbdElShafy is an Egyptian educator, oral historian and social researcher who likes experimenting with different forms of audio-visual production. She has documented personal stories within different migrant and internally displaced communities in Egypt and abroad. In 2020, she was the oral history coordinator for RDP, a project documenting the Egyptian educational reforms. She holds an MA in Oral History from Columbia University, a BSc. of Political Science from Cairo University. Her first short documentary film, 1200 Steps (January 2023), has been selected for screening at the Cairo International Short Film Festival.

Ricia Anne Chansky is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and the Director of the Oral History Lab @UPRM where she leads projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, and American Council of Learned Societies. She is an Assembling Voices Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) at Columbia University, director of the UPRM team of the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico, a Climate Justice Fellow at the Humanities Action Lab at Rutgers-Newark, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Latin America and the Caribbean at York University. Her research focuses on university-community collaborative projects that leverage university assets for the purpose of recording, preserving, and disseminating stories from communities on the frontline of the climate emergency, especially those framed by intergenerational colonialism and environmental racism. Current projects include collaboratively building community archives, structuring portable mass-listening stations, and developing climate communication strategies through data curation for internal and external audiences. Her current book project is an edited collection—Archiving Puerto Rico: Digital Time and the Temporalities of Disaster—and her recent books include The Divided States: Unraveling National Identity in the Twenty-First Century; Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Voices from Puerto Rico; and Maxy Survives the Hurricane / Maxy sobrevive el huracán. She was recognized as a “Big Better” by the Rockefeller Foundation for her work on climate justice and as an International Climate Justice Advocate by the Museum of Tolerance/Simon Wiesenthal Center. She is featured in the museum’s interactive Social Lab as one of four activists whose work is highlighted in the Global Crisis Center section.

Shanna Farrell is an oral historian, writer, and audio producer. She has worked as an interviewer for the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley since 2013, where she specializes in food and beverage culture, environmental history, and art and literature. She is the author of two books, A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits and Bay Area Cocktails: A History of Community, Culture and Craft, and produces The Berkeley Remix podcast. She also serves as a council member for the Oral History Association.

Sean Field is an oral historian of violence and its aftermath and a professor in the Historical Studies Department of the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He has published in various international journals and anthologies, and his monograph: Oral History, Community and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) received the 2012-13 OHA book award. His current in-progress book is an anti-referential critique of trauma theories and their efficacy within oral historiography and fieldwork practices, with particular emphasis on (post)colonial settings, which will be published by Routledge in 2025.

Molly Graham is an oral historian and radio documentarian. At the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, Portland, Maine, she produced the award-winning radio documentary, Besides Life Here, which several National Public Radio affiliates have licensed. Molly co-founded Oral History & Folklife Research, Inc. in 2013, and has an M.A. in Library Science and Archives Management from Simmons College. She currently works for NOAA’s Voices Oral History Archives.

Erin Jessee is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where she works across the Gender History, Global History, and War Studies research clusters. She is the author of Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda: The Politics of History, and co-editor (with Kjell Anderson) of Researching Perpetrators of Genocide. She’s also published in the Oral History Review, Medical History, History in Africa, Memory Studies, Conflict and Society, and Forensic Science International, and serves on the editorial boards for Oxford University Press’ “Oral History” series and the Journal of Perpetrator Research.

Lauren Kata has engaged in oral history at all stages of the lifecycle and within a variety of contexts for more than 20 years. An archivist, Lauren is an active member of OHA, the Society of American Archivists and is on the editorial team of the International Oral History Association’s journal, Words & Silences. Lauren joined NYU Abu Dhabi in 2019 as an academic librarian and is archivist and oral history interviewer for the NYUAD University Archives.

Paul Ortiz is Professor of Labor History at Cornel University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

A PEN Award-winning author, Paul’s book An African American and Latinx History of the United States was identified by Fortune Magazine in 2020 as one of the “10 books on American history that actually reflect the United States.” He is a consultant and narrator for John Leguizamo’s American Historia docuseries on Latino history that will air on PBS this fall. Paul was a consultant and narrator for Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Black Church: This is Our Story. This Is Our Song, which premiered on PBS in 2021.

He was the National Archives Distinguished Fellow in Latinx History from 2021 to 2023, and the 2023-24 Robert L. Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College.

Between 2008 and 2024, he was a professor of history and director of the award-winning Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida.

His book, Emancipation Betrayed was the recipient of the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Book Prize..

Alistair Thomson is a freelance oral historian recently retired from Monash University, Australia, and, before that, the University of Sussex, England. Currently President of Oral History Australia, Al has served as President of the International Oral History Association and co-editor of the British Oral History journal. His writings (many co-authored) include The Oral History Reader, Oral History and Photography, Anzac Memories, Moving Stories: an intimate history of four women across two countries, and Australian Lives: An Intimate History.

Winona Wheeler is a lifelong student of Indigenous knowledge, oral history, anti-colonial theory, and critical Indigenous Studies. She has been teaching and publishing in Indigenous Studies since 1988, and has developed, led, and collaborated on numerous Indigenous oral research projects including, among others, specific land claims, Treaty Rights, and, as an expert witness, on Indigenous oral histories in The Victor Buffalo Case Federal Court case. Winona is currently an Associate Professor in Indigenous Studies at the University of Saskatchewan.