Meet the SOHP

Melody Hunter-Pillion

Acting Director

The SOHP is pleased to announce Melody Hunter-Pillion, Ph.D. as Acting Director for Fall 2026. An historian, journalist, and communications professional, Melody’s academic research focuses on intergenerational narratives in African American and diasporic communities. She is no stranger to the SOHP. As a former Field Scholar, she managed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s LDF Recollection oral history project and has gone on to build an impressive record in public history, including curating exhibits for the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission and producing documentary history series for the North Carolina Museum of History. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from UNC Chapel Hill and brings extensive leadership experience spanning higher education, state government, and healthcare. We are delighted to welcome her back to the Southern Oral History Program.

 

SOHP Director, Renée Alexander Craft

Photo by Jarvis Harris

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.

 

 

 

Ben Barber

Field Scholar

Benjamin Barber is a third-year doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of American Studies. His research focuses on land, democracy, and justice in the rural South. He is also an advocate and scholar with a strong interest in voting rights, democracy, and Southern history. Barber’s work centers on projects that connect history, advocacy, policy, and civic engagement to advance equity, democracy, and social justice. He has written and spoken widely on Southern politics, voting rights, historical memory, and movements for change across the region. He holds a master’s degree from the School of Social Policy & Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in history from Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina.

 

 

 

Megan Foster

Field Scholar

Megan Foster is a 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.

 

Rebekah Barber

Field Scholar

The SOHP is delighted to welcome Rebekah Barber as a Field Scholar for the coming year. Rebekah is a second-year PhD student in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at UNC, where her work sits at the intersection of race, place, and gender — with a particular focus on amplifying the stories of Black women from the South. She brings to the role an impressive breadth of experience: before coming to UNC, she earned bachelor’s degrees in English and History from North Carolina Central University and a master’s in Public Policy from Duke University. Her career in journalism has taken her from the Institute for Southern Studies and its publication Facing South to The 19th* News, where she was an inaugural Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Fellow. We look forward to the perspective and passion she will bring to the SOHP community.

 

Kayla Corbin

Adjunct Professor and Fall 2026 SOHP Art & Oral History Project Manager

The SOHP community is overjoyed to celebrate former former Field Scholar Dr. Kayla Corbin on the successful defense of her dissertation, “Carrying: Black Women, Misogynoir & The Mandate of Mothering,” in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her committee was chaired by Dr. Kumi Silva and included Dr. E. Chebrolu, Dr. Antonia Randolph (American Studies), Dr. Armond Towns (Africana Studies, Williams College), and Dr. Renée Alexander Craft. Corbin’s research centralizes Black Feminist Studies at the intersection of cultural studies, performance studies and media studies. In 2024, Corbin was awarded a Chancellor’s award for excellence in Student Undergraduate Teaching and will return to UNC this fall to join the faculty as Adjunct Professor in both the Department of Communication Studies and the Department of Women’s & Gender Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Kayla will also serve as project manager for the SOHP Art & Oral History initiative.

 

 

Spring 2026 Undergraduate Interns

Spring 2026 Internship

 

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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.