Staff
Della Pollock
Interim Director and Bank of America Term Professor, Department of Communication Studies
Professor Pollock (Ph.D., Northwestern University) specializes in performance and cultural studies and has written extensively on the intersections between oral history and performance. As she wrote in her 2005 book, Remembering: Oral History and Performance, oral historians, performers, and performance scholars are “increasingly discovering shared and complementary investments in orality, dialogue, life stories, and community building, or what more generally might be called living history.” Such living history thrives in Professor Pollock’s work with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Making and Saving History, an organization dedicated to using oral history to strengthen and maintain community tradition in Chapel Hill. She is pictured (second from the right) here with fellow participants in UNC’s Burch Honors Seminar, which she co-led in Kenya.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
Senior Research Fellow
Professor Hall’s research interests include U.S. women’s history, southern history, working-class history, oral history, and cultural/intellectual history. She served as president of the Organization of American Historians in 2003-04 and ofthe Southern Historical Association in 2001-02. She was also the founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association. She was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 1999 for her efforts to deepen the nation’s understanding of and engagement with the humanities, and in 1997, she received UNC’s Distinguished Teaching Award for graduate teaching. Her publications include Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1979, 1993) and Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987, 2000), which she co-authored with James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Chris Daly. She is currently working on a collection of her articles and on two book projects: Writing a Way Home, about women writers and intellectuals and the refashioning of regional identity in the twentieth-century South; and a study of the social movements spawned by the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s and of the ideological, political, and structural factors thatblunted their force.
Rachel F. Seidman
Associate Director
Rachel is a U.S. historian specializing in women’s history. With a B.A. from Oberlin College and a Ph.D. from Yale, Seidman is particularly interested in connecting history to current concerns through civic engagement and community-based research. The author of The Civil War: A History in Documents (Oxford University Press) and several scholarly articles about women in the Civil War, Rachel was previously the Associate Director of the History, Public Policy and Social Change program at Duke University. At Duke she founded and co-directed The Moxie Project: Women and Leadership for Social Change, and directed the Poverty, Ethics and Policy Lab. She continues to work on projects related to women’s activism and poverty in North Carolina at the SOHP.
Elizabeth Millwood
Outreach Coordinator
Beth, who holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Oakland University, has worked for the SOHP since 1997. A specialist in oral history methods, Beth has run training programs for aspiring oral historians around the state and the region, and has spoken on oral history techniques at numerous professional gatherings. She was the 2004 recipient of the Robert E. Bryan Public Service Award, given by UNC for inspiring and practical work in the North Carolina community.
Seth Kotch
Digital Humanities Coordinator
A graduate of Columbia University (B.A.) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A. and Ph.D.), Seth is a historian of the American South who specializes in crime and punishment. He has worked for the SOHP since arriving at Carolina in 2003. He worked on the Oral Histories of the American South project, a digitization effort in partnership with Documenting the American South, and currently works on the Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement project with a number of partners around the university. He led planning for the SOHP’s Spring 2009 conference, The Long Civil Rights Movement: Histories, Politics, Memories, and serves as PI on the Civil Rights History Project, funded by the Smithsonian, and Media and the Movement, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Elizabeth McCain
Coordinator of Undergraduate Initiatives
Elizabeth is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill with B. A. in American History. As an undergraduate she worked on an oral history project with the Rogers Road community and the impact that the landfill on their history. Her work at the SOHP focuses on introducing undergraduates in to oral history through workshops, mentoring student group projects, and coordinating the SOHP internship with Field Scholar, Joey Fink. She also works at the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History.
Joey Fink
Field Scholar
Joey is a Ph.D. candidate in Women’s and Gender History with a focus on 20th Century U.S. history. She received a B.A. in History from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and an M.A. in History from Carolina. Her dissertation, “The Many Norma Raes: Working-Class Women in the Struggle to Organize J.P. Stevens in the 1970s,” combines oral history and archival research to explore the connections between labor struggles, the women’s movement and civil rights activism in the South in the 1970s. Joey has conducted interviews for the SOHP for the University History Project, and interviews in Eastern Tennessee, Southwestern Virginia and North Carolina, contributing to the “Long Women’s Movement in the American South,” the third phase of the Long Civil Rights Movement Project. With Elizabeth McCain, she coordinates the undergraduate internship program.
Daphne Fruchtman
Field Scholar
Daphne is a M.A. student in U.S. History. She received her B.A. in history from Davidson College. While her interests range widely from slavery in colonial America to the music industry in the twentieth century, her primary focus remains on race, society, and legal culture in the nineteenth-century South. She is currently working on her master’s thesis, which explores interracial relationships and conceptions of marriage during the antebellum period.
Rob Shapard
Field Scholar
Rob is a Ph.D. Candidate in U.S. History with a focus on environmental history, the American South, and oral history. He has conducted interviews for SOHP’s Legacy of William Friday project, and the Breaking New Ground project on African American farm owners in the South. He received an M.A. in history from North Carolina State University, an M.A. in journalism from the University of Georgia, and a B.A. in history from Williams College. His dissertation examines how people responded to the near elimination of the South’s longleaf pine forests in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how people have described the longleaf’s story since that time.
Marty Richardson
Field Scholar
Marty is a M.A. student in United States History focusing on southeastern American Indians, identity, race, politics, and culture. He is a member of the Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe of Hollister, N.C. He earned a B.A. in American Indian Studies from UNC Pembroke and a M.A. in anthropology from Indiana University-Bloomington. His defended M.A. thesis looks at how Haliwa-Saponi Indians challenged the South’s black-white binary starting in the 1940s, in order to gain recognition and political autonomy as Indians. He has collected numerous oral histories in the Haliwa-Saponi community and guided two phases of the Haliwa Indian School Documentation Project. His M.A. thesis and upcoming dissertation depend heavily on oral histories.
Alumni
Former members of the SOHP have gone on to do great things.
Kieran Taylor
Assistant Professor of History and Director, Citadel Oral History Program
The Citadel
Kerry is a specialist in 20th-Century American civil rights and labor history. He conducted scores of interviews for the SOHP during the years he spent as a research assistant before becoming its Associate Director in 2007. He has written on labor activism in Detroit, rural activism in North Carolina, the folklorist Archie Green, and many other subjects. His interviews for the SOHP included many in the Remembering Black Main Streets series which investigated the impact of desegregation on black businesses in places like Birmingham and Memphis. Kerry left the SOHP to join the faculty at The Citadel, where he now serves as director of the Citadel Oral History Program. Visit the COHP here.
Natalie Fousekis
Assistant Professor and Associate Director, Center for Oral and Public History
Cal State Fullerton
Natalie is an oral historian and historian of women’s history, grassroots politics, and civil rights who received her Ph.D. from UNC in 2000. She has written on women’s activism and child care, Vietname War dissent, and the experience of oral history. After graduating from UNC, Natalie became the Associate Director of the Center for Oral and Public History at Cal State Fullerton where, in addition to other projects, she has led and oral history project that aims to capture the recollections of World War II and Korean War veterans stationed at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. Learn more about the Center here.
Brent Glass
Director, National Museum of American History
Brent received his Ph.D. here at Carolina in 1980. While a student here, he conducted numerous interviews for the SOHP, including a number of interviews with North Carolina millworkers that ended up in the groundbreaking book Like a Family. Brent went on to lead the North Carolina Humanities Council and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission before taking the directorship of the National Museum of American History. In 2008, he accepted a portrait of Stephen Colbert to join the museum’s collection.
Robert Korstad
Kevin D. Gorter Professor of Public Policy and History and Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Duke University
Bob, who specializes in twentieth-century labor history, African American history, and public policy, joined a number of SOHP colleagues to contribute to Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. He is the author of numerous books and articles, most recently To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America, co-authored with James Leloudis. The book draws on interviews in the SOHP collection by Korstand and Leloudis and is tied to the SOHP’s Long Civil Rights Movement collaboration between the SOHP and partners around Carolina.
James Leloudis
Professor of History, Associate Dean for Honors, and Director, James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Jim, a specialist on the modern American South with particular interest in race, reform, education, and labor, worked with the SOHP on the pathbreaking Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. He is also the author of Schooling the New South:Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920, and To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America(co-authored with fellow SOHP affiliate Robert Korstad). Leloudis’s work on poverty is part of a collaborative initiative on the Long Civil Rights Movement with UNC Press, the UNC Libraries, the Center for Civil Rights and the Southern Oral History Program.
Kathryn Newfont
Associate Professor of History & Faculty Chair of the Ramsey Center for Regional Studies
Mars Hill College
Kathy, who earned her Ph.D. at Carolina in 2001, specializes in U.S. History, where she has broad interests in environmental history, women’s history, regional studies, and oral history. She led the “Environmentalism, Forests, and Communities” portion of the Listening for a Change initiative, and has continued to pursue her interest in environmental history at Mars Hill. Her work in the Southern Appalachian Archives in the college’s Ramsey Center for Regional Studies recently earned a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
David S. Cecelski
Independent Historian
David, an independent historian and an expert on the history of North Carolina, joined the SOHP in its Listening for a Change initiative, He is the author of many books, including Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, NC, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South and most recently, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy. His many interviews in the SOHP collection include oral histories with Mabel Williams, wife of the civil rights activist Robert Williams, Ben Avirett, who brings his family together over his old-fashioned Brunswick stew, and Harry and Sarah Kittner, who describe Jewish life in North Carolina.
Clifford M. Kuhn
Associate Professor
Georgia State University
Cliff, a specialist in 20th-Century southern history, received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993. He worked for the SOHP in 1977 and in 1980, served as Acting Co-Director. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills. Among the many interviews Cliff has contributed to our collection include oral histories with millworkers Josephine Glenn, who witnessed huge changes in mill work during her decades in the industry,James Pharis, who rose to leadership positions on the mill floor and in his union, and Emma Whitesell, who began a lifetime of mill work at age twelve.
Kathyrn Walbert
Instructor
LEARN NC
Since receiving her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Kathy has worked with Duke University and more recently, with LEARN NC, developing materials for professional development on a range of topics in United States and North Carolina history. While at the SOHP, Kathy conducted numerous interviews, including many with female teachers and mill workers, and led many a community oral history workshop.
Steve Estes
Associate Professor
Sonoma State University
Steve is a historian of civil rights, labor, race relations, and sexuality in the United States. He is the author of I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement, Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out, and numerous other books and articles. While working as a project coordinator at the SOHP, Steve conducted a number of interviews with notable North Carolinians and members of the Carolina community.
Kathryn Nasstrom
Associate Professor
University of San Francisco
Kathy served as Acting Director of the SOHP in 1993 and 1994. She is the author of Everybody’s Grandmother and Nobody’s Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice.
Tracy K’Meyer
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of History
Co-Director, Oral History Center
University of Louisville
Tracy, who was active at the Southern Oral History Program while she worked toward her doctorate here at Carolina, is author of numerous books and articles drawing on oral histories, from Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Lousiville, Kentucky, 1945-1980 to Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm. As Co-Director of the University of Louisville’s Oral History Center, Tracy is working on two oral history projects, one on desegregation in Louisville and another on the American Friends Service Committee on Race, Poverty, and Housing. Oral history interviews she conducted while at Carolina include one with the owners of the Barnum Funeral Home, a site for civil rights organizing in Sumter County, GA.
Alicia Rouverol
Independent Folklorist
A folklorist and oral historian, while at the SOHP Alicia co-coordinated three “Listening for a Change Projects,” one examining new immigrants and neigborhood change in Durham, NC; also in Durham, a life review with HIV patients; and another on prison inmates in Anson County, NC. Alicia co-authored “I Was Content and Not Content”: The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry.
Pamela Grundy
Independent Historian
While at the SOHP, Pam coordinated the “Listening for a Change” project that documented race and desegregation at West Charlotte High School, using what she gathered to curate an exhibit on the subject at the Museum of the New South. Pam has authored many books and articles, including Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women’s Basketball.
David Cline
Assistant Professor of History
Virginia Tech University
A former Associate Director and Acting Director of the SOHP, David is Assistant Professor in the History Department at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on 20th century U.S. social movements, oral history, and public history. He has a particular interest in the roles of religious progressives in social movements, including the civil rights and women’s movement. His public history work has included museum exhibits, contributions to radio and film documentaries, large-scale oral history projects with the Library of Congress and others, and a 2005 project to document the Cherokee Trail of Tears. David is the author of Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961-1973 and was a recipient of the National Council on Public History’s New Professional Award in 2004.
