Meet the SOHP

Renée Alexander Craft

Director

For nearly twenty-five years, her ethnographic and oral history projects have focused on an Afro-Latin community located in the small coastal town of Portobelo, Panama who call themselves and their carnival performance tradition “Congo.” She is the author of When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in 20th Century Panama and a digital humanities project titled Digital Portobelo: Art + Scholarship + Cultural Preservation (digitalportobelo.org). In addition, she collaborated with Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, and Thomas F. DeFrantz to co-edited The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance. Alexander Craft’s current research is a multi-modal project titled “Patacones, Paint Brushes, and Power: Historicizing an African Diaspora Arts Collective at the Crossroads of the Americas.” The project consists of an art exhibition, a series of public fireside conversations, a podcast, a manuscript, and a digital humanities project analyzing and amplifying the impact of a Portobelo-based artist retreat on a generation of prominent African American and Afro-Latin artists.

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.

Photo by Derrick Beasley

Anna Elliott

Field Scholar

Anna Elliott (she/her) is a scholar and artist pursuing her PhD in American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. She focuses on the historiography of the American South. In particular, she is interested in the paid and unpaid labor that women perform at historic house museums. Through this, she investigates the gendered and racialized politics of public performances of history. Her work is somewhere near the inter-disciplines of American studies, critical food studies, and labor history. She is very excited to work with the SOHP! 

Melody Hunter-Pillion

Field Scholar

Melody Hunter-Pillion is a Laurinburg, North Carolina native and a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies. She explores the use of intergenerational narratives as tools of adaptation and resiliency developed in eastern North Carolina’s African American fishing and farming communities. Melody positions local traditional knowledge as a valued epistemology that offers lessons to all communities. Melody is a SECASC Global Change Fellow alumna and serves as co-chair of the national Oral History Association Diversity Commitee. She is currently coordinating the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project for the SOHP. A broadcast journalist and former communications director for the Office of State Human Resources and Rex Healthcare, Melody earned her BA in Communication from North Carolina State University and an MA in Liberal Studies from Duke University.

Lauren Rekhelman

Field Scholar

Lauren Rekhelman (she/her) is a second-year MA student in Folklore. Her research focuses on contemporary Jewish life in the American South and explores how Jewish individuals and communities creatively engage material environments, ritual practices, and emergent values to negotiate selfhood, heritage, and belonging. Outside of academic work, Lauren enjoys crafting, baking, and spending as much time as possible exploring the Eno River with her dog, Abbie. 

Sophie To

Field Scholar

Sophie To is a PhD candidate in the Department of Health Behavior. Her research examines how media, arts, and storytelling are used to address health issues and advocate for racial equity. Their dissertation will explore how Asian American comedians in the South experience and tell stories about racialization and health. Before coming back to her hometown of Chapel Hill, Sophie received a BA from Vanderbilt and an MPH from Yale, and she worked in community health. Sophie is currently co-teaching the SOHP’s internship seminar.

John Felix Arnold

SOHP Artist in Residence

Spring 2023 Undergraduate Interns

(L-R): Sonia Rao; Maitreyee Singh; Sophie Krejci; Tara Hinton; Astrid Knox-McConnell; Jude Howard; Jenna Land; Micah McLaughlin; and Abby Mueller

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.