Dr. Matthew Jacobs, Acting Director
Associate Professor Matthew Jacobs received his Ph.D. in 2002 in U.S. History with a specialty in Foreign Relations from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his M.A. in 1996 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his B.A. in 1993 from Cornell University. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on twentieth century U.S. foreign relations, particularly with the Middle East, and international and world history more broadly. He has received the Department of History’s John K. Mahon Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2004-2005) and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teacher of the Year Award (2009-2010).
Professor Jacobs’ first book, entitled Imagining the Middle East: The Building of An American Foreign Policy, 1918-1967, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in summer 2011. An Arabic language edition (Sutour Publications) and an English language edition (American University of Cairo Press) were released simultaneously in the Middle East. The book examines the ways in which an informal network of specialists in academia, business, the government and the media interpreted the Middle East and the United States’ role there through the middle half of the twentieth century. He published an early version of a portion of this work that focused on interpretations of Islam in Diplomatic History (September 2006).
Professor Jacobs has begun work on two new projects. The first, tentatively titled Islam and US, investigates official and unofficial U.S. responses to the rise of political Islam as a global phenomenon since 1960. Thus, the work will deal with U.S. involvement in Africa and Asia as well as the Middle East. The second project uses sports as a vehicle to examine critical issues in post-1945 international history (i.e., colonialism/post-colonialism, the international economy, sports as an arena for the prevention and/or extension of international conflict, etc.).
Professor Jacobs is director of the Bob Graham Center for Public Service.
Anna Hamilton, Assistant Director
Anna Hamilton is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work leverages oral history to better understand place-making and migration associated with the climate crisis in the American South. She joined SPOHP as assistant director in 2023. Anna collaborates with the director and SPOHP staff in this role to support and manage the program’s mission, programmatic and fieldwork projects, and day-to-day activities.
Anna holds a BA in Humanities from New College of Florida, a master’s in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi, and was a Fulbright scholar to the Republic of Mauritius. Her oral history-based master’s thesis examined the Datil pepper of St. Augustine and its potent cultural mythology connected to the region’s Minorcan population and heritage tourism; this project won the University of Mississippi’s Ann Abadie Award for Documentary Media.
Anna is an avid oral historian, having worked for more than a decade developing, consulting on, and contributing to a wide range of projects, including for New College of Florida and Sarasota County; the Southern Foodways Alliance; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the Florida Folklife Program; and the Southern Oral History Program. She is also project director of Matanzas Voices, an ongoing oral history initiative documenting life, work, and change along northeast Florida’s Matanzas River.
She is an editor and co-founder of The Marjorie, an award-winning reporting nonprofit covering environmental and social justice issues in Florida.
Ms. Deborah Hendrix, Digital Humanities Production Coordinator
Ms. Deborah Hendrix, a native of St. Simons Island, Georgia, completed early studies in marine biology at Brunswick Jr. College, Brunswick, Georgia. While figuring out next steps, worked in clinical medical hospital laboratories. The latter part of that 20-year plan included completing a graphic design degree from Santa Fe Community College in 2000. Two years later in 2002 completed an associate of arts degree from SFCC which led to University of Florida admission in 2002 for a bachelor’s degree in history completed in 2006. Worked concurrently with the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program starting in 2000, and have been with the program ever since, becoming full time in 2014 as the technology coordinator. Today our major ongoing tasks are quality interview recording for the future, archive management, and assisting students, faculty, and the wider community in all things oral history.
Ms. Hendrix was awarded the University of Florida Superior Staff Accomplishment Award in 2016. She is widely acknowledged as one of the most outstanding educators in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; she has instructed hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students as well as faculty in digital humanities production and editing techniques during this review period. Deborah is by far the single most often consulted person in the College Liberal Arts and Sciences on editing, production, and preservation of digital data and story telling. Deborah provides expert hands-on-training for numerous UF undergraduate seminars working on final class documentary projects. Units across the campus also frequently request that Deborah film and record high-profile and world-historical guest speakers on campus at UF. Deborah is SPOHP’s expert on digital processing and archival methods and our main connection to digital archivists at Smathers Libraries. In this capacity, Deborah is responsible for managing SPOHP’s 7,500+ collection of oral history interviews and making these ultimately accessible to students, scholars and members of the general public. Deborah does a superb job of answering questions from scholars from across the world who have queries about UF’s Oral History holdings. Deborah’s expertise in digital humanities is sought out by organizations across the country and she has served on several national Oral History Association committees.
Ronan Hart, Network to Freedom Underground Railroad Oral History Project Coordinator
Ronan Hart is the project coordinator for the Underground Railroad Oral History Project, a partnership with the National Park Service’s Network to Freedom program. He plans, conducts, and transcribes interviews with descendants of Underground Railroad freedom seekers, conductors, and stationmasters, with the aim of educating and inspiring the general public about this dramatic chapter in American history. Ronan is a Double Gator, having received his BA in history in 2023 and his MA in history in 2024, both from UF. His research has focused on the British empire, Ireland in the wider Atlantic World, the international abolitionist movement, and the political dimensions of Romanticism. He began as a volunteer with SPOHP on the 2021 Mississippi Freedom Project, before becoming a part-time transcriber and researcher. He has conducted interviews for SPOHP projects including the Mississippi Freedom Project, the Veterans History Project, Challenging Racism @ UF, and the Florida Water Management project, but now focuses exclusively on the Underground Railroad Oral History Project.
Lauren Manso, Research Assistant
Lauren Manso is a senior at UF pursuing BAs in history, sociology, and International (Middle East) Studies and minoring in Women’s Studies. She has been a student assistant at SPOHP since Fall 2023, working primarily on the Underground Railroad Project and serving as project coordinator for the Florida Queer History Project. Her academic research focuses on marginalized histories in Middle Eastern contexts, and she is currently working on two senior honors theses for her sociology and history degrees focusing on the sociocultural history of gender ideology and performativity in Turkey. She was awarded the O. Ruth McQuown undergraduate scholarship award in the Spring of 2024 and was a UF University Scholar for the 2023-2024 academic year for which she pursued research on the history of racialized sexuality in colonial Cuba. Her article, “Degrees of Desirability” will be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal for Undergraduate Research at UF. Lauren is passionate about studying race, gender, and sexuality in global contexts; although her regional interests are in the Middle East and Turkey, she hopes to integrate all that she’s learned at SPOHP with her upcoming graduate studies.
Hélio Augusto de Souza Alves, Graduate Assistant
Hélio Augusto de Souza Alves is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Latin American and Caribbean History at UF, where he works with Dr. Lillian Guerra. He earned a B.A. and master’s degree in history from São Paulo State University (UNESP) in 2017 and 2021, respectively. Throughout his academic career, Hélio has received several awards and fellowships from national and international agencies, which have enabled him to study and conduct research in Brazil, Bolivia, Cuba, and the United States. His previous research focused on Fidel Castro’s public image and popularity in Cuba between 1952 and 1959. For his current research project, he analyzes political and economic reforms in Cuba and their effects on society from the 1970s to the 1990s. He also examines the role of the population in advocating for or benefiting from these changes and investigates popular reactions when state reforms diverged from the official narrative.
Agnieszka (Aga) Ilwicka-Karuna, Graduate Assistant
Agnieszka (Aga) Ilwicka-Karuna is a PhD candidate in Jewish Studies UF’s History Department. Her work focuses primarily on the postwar migration, languages, women and children’s history, memory and politics, and, last but not least, oral history. Aga graduated from the Jewish Studies program at the University of Southampton, with a masters of research degree. She also holds an MA and BA in Humanities from the University of Wrocław. In 2012-2013 she was awarded a one year fellowship that led her into the path of oral history. Since then she has recorded over 150 interviews in Yiddish, Polish and English among the Jewish communities in Poland, Israel and the United States. The interviews are available here: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/wexler-oral-history-project
Aga is a strong advocate for human, animals and nature rights. Her main areas of interest are migration, philanthropy, memory and the preservation of languages, with a strong focus on the Yiddish language and culture. In the academic year of 2024-2025 Aga is continuing her involvement with SPOHP as graduate assistant.
Mattison Mathews, Intern
Mattison Mathews is a junior majoring in history and pursuing a minor in mass communications. Through her UF coursework and outside involvement, she has developed a passion for critically engaged research and a specific interest in Florida’s Gulf coast communities. Since her time at UF, Mathews has been involved in the Phi Alpha Theta History Honors Society Gamma Eta Chapter and the Pre-Legal Honor Society. She has also participated in an experiential learning Washington D.C. excursion hosted by Beyond 120 and the Bob Graham Center for Public Service that further aligned her interests in working for the public’s benefit. After graduation, Mathews plans on pursuing a career in law, where she hopes to work as a real estate attorney. By participating in SPOHP’s internship program centered around the Pensacola Environmental Oral History Project, Mathews hopes to learn more about the experiences of those living near superfund sites, as well as the oral history research and interview process.
Beckett Price, Intern
Beckett Price is a Gainesville native and UF senior studying history with a minor in English. He researches Florida as a significant space for the rich history of cultural exchange in the Atlantic corridor. He first joined SPOHP as an intern on the Underground Railroad Project and fell in love with oral history. In addition to his involvement in the internship, Beckett is SPOHP’s inaugural Gulf Scholars Oral History Fellow, and works on the Pensacola Environmental Oral History Project, a collection of interviews with Pensacola residents involved in some way in the numerous vulnerable sites of human contamination along the Gulf coast. Beckett is passionate about the power of orality and spoken traditions in public memory and hopes to continue working with storytelling—and incorporating the lessons it imparts—throughout his life.
Caitlin Remmert, Intern
Caitlin Remmert is a sophomore majoring in economics at UF. Through her coursework and outside involvement, she has developed a deep passion for law, economics, and environmental justice. Remmert is an active member of UF Model United Nations, the Women in Economics club, and the Pre-legal Honor Society. She has also been involved with the Gulf Scholars Program, completing an introductory research project in Spring 2024 and participating in a field excursion in Summer 2024 for the Pensacola Environmental Oral History Project. Looking ahead, Caitlin aspires to attend law school and further her commitment to these areas of interest.
Chaowen Zheng, Intern
Chaowen Zheng is a UF freshman majoring in history. He began researching the Abbasid-Persian relationship and the Translation Movement a year ago and is now writing a thesis investigating the multicultural diversity and Persianization’s impact on the Medieval Islamic Empires. This fall, he joined SPOHP as an intern for the Pensacola Oral History Project. He is also a successful online history tutor, dedicated to teaching the John Locke Essay Competition and Advanced Placement History courses.
For additional information, contact SPOHP, call the offices at (352) 392-7168, and connect with us online today.