Renée Alexander Craft
Director

Photo by Matt Ramey
Phillip MacDonald
Associate Director
Phillip MacDonald is a folklorist, archivist, and photographer born, raised, and currently living amongst the long-leaf pines in North Carolina. Phillip’s work focuses on increasing the visibility and use of archival material, primarily oral histories, across the university campus and surrounding communities- through experiential learning and public engagement. Phillip is a two-time Tar Heel alum. He holds an MS in Library Science and an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a BA in History from North Carolina State University. Phillip’s professional interests include engaging with special collection materials in the creative-making process, cultivating inclusive archival spaces, and using emerging technology and hands-on instruction. He is currently co-teaching the SOHP’s internship seminar.
Kayla Corbin
Field Scholar
Kayla Corbin is a fifth-year Doctoral Candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Communication Studies. Corbin’s research centralizes Black Feminist Studies at the intersection of cultural studies, performance studies and media studies. In addition to being a teaching fellow in the Department of Communication, she is also a teaching fellow in the Department of Women & Gender Studies. In 2024, Corbin was awarded a Chancellor’s award for excellence in Student Undergraduate Teaching. Corbin’s dissertation work looks at how misogynoir as social theory helps us to understand the ways in which heteropatriarchy structures violence against Black women. Corbin is currently working with Dr. Renée Alexander-Craft on a multi-modal interdisciplinary project, Patacones, Paintbrushes & Power, that includes collecting oral histories, an art exhibition, a book project, and a digital humanities project.
Megan Foster
Field Scholar
Simiyha Garrison
Field Scholar
Simiyha Garrison is a family-oriented North Carolina native, public historian, archivist, curator, and doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she focuses on food, race, and culture within the African Diaspora, particularly in the American South. She earned her second master’s degree in American Studies in 2024 and a master’s in Heritage Studies and Public History from the University of Minnesota in 2020. A 2018 graduate of Winston-Salem State University, she holds a double major in Africana Studies and History. Additionally, she is a UNC Writing Coach, a recipient of the 2025 Druscilla French Graduate Excellence Award, a Spring 2025 Critical Ethnic Studies Fellow, and a 2024-25 Southern Futures Fellow. Simiyha is passionate about creating public history projects, working closely with students throughout their academic journey, and on community-based initiatives that prioritize marginalized stories through oral history and archival research.
John Felix Arnold
SOHP Artist in Residence
Fall 2024 Undergraduate Interns
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
Program Founder and Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita of History
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 of the 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. Her most recent publication is “The Good Fight,” in Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South, edited by Samia Serageldin and Lee Smith (UNC Press, 2019). Her book, Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle of the Soul of America, published by W. W. Norton in May 2019, grew out of some of the earliest interviews she did for the Southern Oral History Program.