Meet the SOHP

Renée Alexander Craft conducting an oral history

Renée Alexander Craft

Director

Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor Renée Alexander Craft is a writer, scholar, and educator whose research and teaching are animated by methods of oral history and ethnographic research. Her work explores how Black communities across the Americas use creativity, performance, and storytelling to preserve culture, build community, and imagine new futures. She is the author of When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance; she also created the digital humanities project Digital Portobelo (digitalportobelo.org) and is co-curator of Patacones, Paintbrushes, and Power: Historicizing an African Diaspora Arts Collective at the Crossroads of the Americas, a project which includes an exhibition hosted by the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (Sept 5–Nov 1, 2025), an exhibition catalog, a digital humanities project,  and forthcoming manuscript.
 
 
Phillip MacDonald head shot

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

Megan Foster is a six-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at UNC Chapel Hill. She is an artist, advocate, teacher, and community accountable scholar. Her interdisciplinary work centers on performance, cultural, and critical race studies. Foster’s larger work explores how power is utilized through techniques of terror deployed by the state against people of the Black diaspora and how these techniques manifest in the carceral state, public welfare programs, and the child welfare system. Her dissertation examines how motherhood and reproductive rights are transformed through criminality, imprisonment, and the lawful relinquishing of rights over the Black incarcerated body and that of her child. In 2025, she wrote, directed, and produced Fight Like Hell, a staged performance centering the voices of Black justice-impacted women who survived reproductive injustice and incarceration.
 
Foster was the 2024 McColl Dissertation Fellow through the Center for the Study of the American South, a recipient of the NC Excellence Award, was a member of the 2023-2024 Townsend Fellows cohort, and the 2024 Critical Ethnic Studies Fellows program. She has served as a research assistant for the University Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward and a participant in the WGST Certificate program at UNC. She also serves as an instructor for the UNC Correctional Education Program through the Digital and Lifelong Learning Program.

 

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

John Felix Arnold (b. 1980, Durham, NC), is an American contemporary artist. Arnold’s multi-disciplinary practice employs a wide range of media, with a focus on the intersection of drawing, sculpture, installation, sound and movement research. His research-based practice explores themes of movement and the body, myth making, material histories and symbolism, alchemy, and personal narrative. He received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY (02’), and is currently in the MFA Studio Art Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (25’). He has exhibited and presented at SFMOMA, Nasher Museum of Art, B.R.I.C. House, The Luggage Store Gallery, Anchorlight, Aggregate Space, and Spes-Lab Experimental Art Space Tokyo. He has been in residence with Duke University’s Rubenstein Visiting Artist Program, Cassilhaus, and the Peter Bullogh Foundation. He has received a Southern Futures Fellowship, U.N.C. Wilson Library Incubator Award, U.N.C. Southern Oral History Program Artist in Residence Award, Duke University Arts Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Covid 19 Emergency Grant, and Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Public Art Grant. His work has been collected by the Duke University Rubenstein Arts Center, The U.N.C. Chapel Hill Sloane Art Library, and Kai Kai Ki Ki Ltd. He is a former contributing writer for the Coastal Post, and has written for Border Crossing Magazine.

 

Fall 2024 Undergraduate Interns

Class picture of the SOHP Internship course Fall 2024

 

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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.