2025 Year-End Review
Director’s Note
Dear SOHP Community,
It is a pleasure—and a profound responsibility—to write to you as Director of the Southern Oral History Program. Although SOHP has remained hard at work throughout the past year, this newsletter marks our first comprehensive communication in some time. I want to begin by thanking you for your enduring care for this program and your shared belief in the power of personal narratives to help us understand where we have been, who we are, and who we might yet become.
For more than half a century, SOHP has advanced a simple but transformative mission: to listen with care, to preserve with purpose, and to honor the stories that shape the US South in all its complexity. As a North Carolina native—born and raised in Charlotte, a UNC double alum, and a 20-year resident of Durham—stepping into this role feels like a profound homecoming. This is not my first time at the helm of SOHP, but it is my first leading the organization in a permanent capacity. I am both excited and humbled to steward one of the most respected regional oral history archives in the nation—a collection of more than 6,000 interviews. As a steward-leader, I am committed to learning in public and leading with clarity and integrity. If something we do falls short, please tell us. When we exceed your expectations, we would love to know that, too. Work with us, dream with us, and help us make the SOHP as strong and welcoming as we can be.
photo by Matt Ramey
I also am delighted to formally introduce SOHP’s Associate Director, Phillip MacDonald, who joined the program shortly before I did and has been a steady partner in this work. A folklorist, archivist, and photographer born and raised in North Carolina, Phillip is a two-time Carolina alum with a deep commitment to making archival materials—especially oral histories—more visible and widely used through experiential learning and public engagement. His interests include cultivating inclusive archival spaces, connecting special collections to creative practice, and leveraging emerging technologies to broaden access, which he brings to our undergraduate internship seminar.
I hope this newsletter serves as both an update and an invitation—to (re)connect with SOHP, to explore the stories that animate our work, and to join us and the Center for the Study of the American South in imagining what comes next. Thank you for being part of this community. We are excited to move forward with you.
Warmest,
Renée Alexander Craft
Director, Southern Oral History Program
Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor
SOHP Directors roundtable at the 30th anniversary of the Center for the Study of the American South and Southern Cultures and the 50th anniversary of the renowned Southern Oral History Program
Join the SOHP Mapping Project
As we look forward to the next chapter of SOHP’s work, we invite you to participate in the SOHP Mapping Project, a new initiative to strengthen our wide-ranging community and reinforce the ties that connect us.
For more than fifty years, SOHP has been shaped by the people who have passed through its doors—researchers, field scholars, interns, staff members, faculty partners, and community collaborators. This is a remarkable network. Please tell us where you are now and how oral history continues to inform your work, your practice, and your path.
By adding your information, you will help us:
- Rebuild and visualize our national community, from North Carolina to wherever your work has carried you
- Create new networking opportunities for undergraduate interns seeking to expand their practice
- Support graduate Field Scholars pursuing professional pathways in oral history, public history, and community-engaged research
- Strengthen connections across generations of SOHP storytellers, listeners, and collaborators
If you have been affiliated with SOHP in any way—past or present—please take a moment to add your name to the map, using the link and QR code below. Your participation will help us reintroduce the SOHP community to one another and guide the future of our shared work.
We look forward to seeing where you are—and to building what comes next, together.
2025 Partnerships that Moved Us Forward
Keynote dialogue between Janai Nelson, President and Director-Counsel of the LDF, and Ted Shaw, Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights at UNC, moderated by Meredith Clark, Associate Professor of Race and Political Communication at UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media
Documenting a Civil Rights Legacy
The Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and SOHP reached a major milestone in our multi-year partnership with the completion of Phase One. With the support of SOHP Field Scholars Susie Penman (PhD, American Studies, UNC ’24), Irene Newman (PhD, American Studies, UNC ’24), and Melody Hunter-Pillion (PhD, American Studies, UNC ’25), SOHP designed and implemented a national oral history project documenting the behind-the-scenes strategies, lived experiences, and human stories that shaped some of the most consequential civil rights cases of the last century. Spanning research, interviewing, videography coordination, transcript auditing, and archival preparation, this work now forms the foundation of a collection that will support scholarship and public understanding for generations to come. Public programs, including a Spring 2025 UNC-based symposium and a collaborative presentation at the 2025 Oral History Association Conference, amplified the reach and impact of this effort and underscored the enduring importance of oral history to civil rights storytelling. We extend our sincere thanks to Kimberly Villafuerte Barzola, Assistant Archivist at LDF, and Kayla Jenkins, Manager of Archives at LDF, for their close collaboration and guidance throughout the project. Former SOHP Director Seth Kotch and current Director Renée Alexander Craft serve as co–principal investigators on this project.
Student's USSW presentation during 2025 spring symposium
Organizing, Labor, and Everyday Resistance
In Spring 2025, our undergraduate internship, led by Phillip MacDonald and supported by Field Scholar Anna Elliott (Doctoral student, American Studies), centered on documenting the voices of worker–organizers across the South. Students interviewed Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW) members and leaders whose experiences reveal how oral history and labor organizing intersect as tools of dignity, imagination, and change. The USSW is a growing, cross-industry movement of low-wage workers organizing for dignity, fair pay, and safe working conditions across the South. Formed in 2022, USSW unites workers from fast food, retail, care, and other service sectors to challenge structural inequities and build collective power. Their organizing offers students a compelling lens into contemporary labor activism and the everyday struggles shaping southern working life. We are deeply grateful to USSW Director Ben Wilkins, Political Education Coordinator Lindsey Jordan, and staff member Clara Hazlett Norman for their guidance, partnership, and coordination, as well as to union worker-leaders Bertha “Mama Cookie” Bradley and Earl Bradley for generously visiting with the class and sharing their stories. Together, this collaboration strengthened our commitment to documenting contemporary struggles for justice and uplifting the everyday acts of resistance that shape southern life.
Renée Alexander Craft and Olivia Terenzio, Project Threadways
Expanding Textile Histories
Launched in 2024, SOHP’s collaboration with Project Threadways focuses on preserving and expanding a growing oral history collection on textile labor, craft, community life, and creative practice across the South. Founded by Natalie Chanin of Alabama Chanin in Florence, Alabama, Project Threadways documents, studies, and interprets history, community, and power through the lens of fashion and textiles. After Field Scholar Lauren Rekhelman (Doctoral student, American Studies) completed foundational research, Associate Director Phillip MacDonald’s Fall 2025 internship cohort, supported by Field Scholar Simiyha Garrison (Doctoral candidate, American Studies), conducted ten new interviews in the North Carolina Piedmont, extending the project’s geographic and historical reach. Students shared their findings at the Fall 2025 SOHP Symposium, joined by Olivia Terenzio, Project Threadways Associate Director of Programs and Scholarship. Together, we are building a regional archive that honors the artistry, resilience, and labor that have shaped textile communities for generations.
2025 Fall SOHP Internship Course
2025-2026 Field Scholars
![[L to R] Kayla Corbin (Doctoral candidate, Communication), Megan Foster (Doctoral candidate, Communication), and Simiyha Garrison (Doctoral candidate, American Studies)](https://sohp.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/field-scholars-copy-1024x512.jpg)
[L to R] Kayla Corbin (Doctoral candidate, Communication), Megan Foster (Doctoral candidate, Communication), and Simiyha Garrison (Doctoral candidate, American Studies)
Former Field Scholar Melody Hunter-Pillion Defends Her Dissertation
Join the Southern Oral History Program in congratulating Melody Hunter-Pillion from the Department of American Studies, who successfully defended her doctoral dissertation this November. Melody's dissertation, “Masters of Our Own Domain: Oral Tradition Among African American Farmers, Fishermen, and Landowners,” centered around oral history interviews with current and former farmers and fishermen in the North Carolina Coastal Plain counties of Brunswick, Bladen, Carteret, and Craven. Her interviews, conducted between 2019 and 2024, explore how Black communities in Eastern North Carolina have used intergenerational narratives as tools to face, and adjust to, challenges dating back to the state’s earliest colonial history.
Public Scholarship in Action
Performing Sankofa: Race, Institution Building, and Staging Oral History
The SOHP shared its work on the national stage at the 2025 Oral History Association Conference, where Director Renée Alexander Craft and Field Scholars Kayla Corbin, Megan Foster, Simiyha Garrison, and recent UNC graduate Skyler Clay (’25) led a listening session titled “Performing Sankofa: Race, Institution Building, and Staging Oral History.” The session featured a 30-minute staged reading from the Institute of African American Research Oral History Project, drawing on interviews conducted, transcribed, and curated by Alexander Craft’s 2023 undergraduate/graduate bridge class.
This Is Your Democracy’: Stories from the Legal Defense Fund
Additionally, SOHP presented a roundtable discussion, “‘This Is Your Democracy’: Stories from the Legal Defense Fund,” highlighting the program’s ongoing collaboration with the LDF to document the organization’s 85-year legacy of advancing civil rights. Organized by former SOHP Field Scholar Melody Hunter-Pillion (American Studies, UNC ’25), the panel included her alongside Kimberly Villafuerte Barzola (LDF), Jesse Paddock (LDF Oral History Project), Danita Mason Hogan (Duke University), and Alissa Rae Funderburk (Margaret Walker Center). It featured interview excerpts and reflections from panelists. Both sessions were well attended and enthusiastically received, underscoring SOHP’s commitment to creative, justice-centered oral history practice.
Jonathan Tarleton and SOHP founder Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
In the spring and fall, we curated symposia to highlight ongoing projects as well as the work of SOHP undergraduate interns. Our spring symposium opened with a powerful conversation between urban planner, designer, and writer Jonathan Tarleton (UNC, ‘21) and SOHP founder and emeritus professor Jacquelyn Dowd Hall on Tarleton’s new book, Homes for the Living, which focuses on housing justice in NYC, followed by a day celebrating our collaboration with the LDF. Panels explored the preservation and activation of civil rights narratives, culminating in a keynote dialogue between Janai Nelson, President and Director-Counsel of the LDF, and Ted Shaw, Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Civil Rights at UNC, moderated by Meredith Clark, Associate Professor of Race and Political Communication at UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The symposium concluded with presentations from SOHP students and community partners highlighting the USSW oral history project and labor solidarity work across the South.
SOHP Student's Fall 2025 Presentation
Our fall symposium celebrated our ongoing collaboration with Project Threadways, showcasing student StoryMaps that illuminated the lives, labor, and creativity of their narrators. The event opened with thoughtful introductory remarks from Olivia Terenzio, Associate Director of Project Threadways, whose insights grounded the students’ work in the broader history of southern textiles. We were delighted to welcome community members, families, and narrators, whose presence enriched the conversations and deepened the sense of shared storytelling.
Launching in 2026:
The SOHP Art & Oral History Incubator
Beginning in 2026, the Southern Oral History Program will embark on a major new initiative—the SOHP Art & Oral History Incubator, a year-long creative research project designed to bring artists, oral historians, archivists, scholars, and community partners into shared inquiry. Rooted in Southern and African Diaspora traditions, the Incubator will support cross-disciplinary exploration at the intersections of oral history, artmaking, performance, and archival research. The project was inspired, in part, by SOHP’s inaugural artist-in-residency experience with John Felix Arnold (MFA UNC ’25).
Guided by core values of ethical, community-centered practice, transparency, reflection, and shared authority, the Incubator aims to deepen engagement with lived experience and archival memory while fostering new collaborations across campus and throughout the region. Over the course of the year, we anticipate supporting a cohort of artists as they develop original work; add new oral histories to the SOHP archive; and create public-facing programs, installations, and performances that invite broader community engagement.
A foundational stakeholder convening in early 2026 will bring together artists, archivists, scholars, and community leaders to collaboratively shape the vision for the program. The year will include a spring public event focused on Affrilachia: Testimonies, a visual history created by photographer Chris Aluka Berry; oral historian, writer, and poet Kelly Navies; and historian Maia A. Surdam. During the Summer of 2026, we will launch a five-day local-artist incubator focused on creative experimentation with the SOHP and Wilson Library archives, and we will spotlight artists’ projects in 2026–27 through a series of events.
The initiative will culminate in the Summer 2027 Art & Oral History Institute, a national convening that builds on lessons from the inaugural local incubator and expands the circle of collaboration. Ultimately, the Incubator will also lay the groundwork for a special issue of Southern Cultures that documents the methods, processes, and creative outcomes of the program.
This next chapter represents an exciting expansion of SOHP’s work—one that honors our commitment to ethical storytelling, community engagement, and creative practice while imagining bold new futures for the field.
Pieces from John Felix Arnold’s thesis exhibition "Sermons in the Soil--"
This is from John Felix Arnold’s thesis exhibition "Sermons in the Soil--"
“All of this work was created with the support of the SOHP [Artist in] Residency award, as the award laid the foundation for me in developing the framework of ongoing practice, creating works that reimagine landscape and monument, confronting historical revisionist narratives, and listening more deeply to the resonant voices that make up place and the landscape itself."
'Tis the Season for
Good Stories with Great People
As we head into the holiday season, we wish you moments of rest, reflection, and meaningful connection. If you find yourself gathered with family or loved ones, we invite you to consider the power of conversation across generations. In a recent New York Times piece, SOHP Director Renée Alexander Craft reflects on the importance of interviewing family elders and listening deeply to the stories they carry—an especially fitting practice for this time of year. We hope it encourages you to ask a thoughtful question, record a memory, or simply listen a little longer over the break.