Each year, SPOHP graduates interns, volunteers, staff members and contributing scholars. The work of these outstanding alumni helped to further oral history studies and bring public history to the world during their time with the program.
2022
Sandra Romero, Historically Black Colleges and Universities Project Coordinator
Sandra Romero received her Bachelor’s Degree in Classical Studies in Fall 2016. Sandra began working with SPOHP as a transcriber for oral histories in Fall 2015. In 2016, she founded the HBCU Project which documents the legacies and importance of Historically Black Colleges and Universities through the interviews of alumni and current students. She is also a leading transcriptionist for the African-American History Project. Sandra has recently joined the Poarch Creek Project, transcribing archival audio records within the Hugo Rozelle Collection. She has worked on the Annual Virginia Fieldwork in Folklore Trip and also was the leading coordinator for the Melrose “Back in the Day” trip this year. Sandra hopes expand her project on a high school level and also hopes to receive her Master’s in the next few years.
Mosunmola Ogunmolaji
Miss Mosunmola Regina Ogunmolaji holds a Master of Arts in History and Strategic Studies. She is currently a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at UF. Her research interests include gender studies, history of medicine, and African history. Upon joining the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, Mosunmola assisted with the Doris Duke Revitalizing Oral Histories Project and the African American History Project. Moreover, Mosunmola established and is currently conducting interviews for the Oak Hammock Oral History Project.
Ray Eberling, Veterans History Project Co-Coordinator
Ray Eberling is a retired United States Air Force lieutenant colonel who spent the majority of his career as a KC-135 navigator for both the Strategic Air Command and the Air National Guard. He later held staff positions with the National Guard Bureau, Pentagon; the United States Special Operations Command; and Headquarters, United States Air Forces, Europe (USAFE). A 1970 graduate of the University of Florida with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education, after retiring from the Air Force he earned a Master of Arts in American Studies from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, utilizing the GI Bill. In 2010 he was the recipient of the SPOHP’s Julian Pleasants Travel Award while pursuing a doctorate at Heidelberg.
In the past Ray has been an adjunct for Eckerd College’s American Studies program, where he taught courses such as “The US Military in American Society” and “Television in American Life.” He has served as a volunteer for the SPOHP since 2012, primarily conducting oral histories with veterans who served during periods ranging from World War II to the present.
Don Obrist, Veterans History Project Co-Coordinator
Don Obrist joined SPOHP in 2011 after retiring from a 38-year career in consumer product sales and marketing in Upstate New York. He has interviewed Veterans who have served in World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War of 1990-1991.
In the Fall of 2015, Don presented at the Annual Oral History Association Conference, in Tampa, Fl, “Veterans of WW II Tell Their Stories”. Don also works to develop greater awareness of SPOHP by presenting to a number of Veterans groups.
Don has a B.A. degree in Political Science from the State University of New York, and an M.B.A. from Syracuse University. He served for six years in the New York Army National Guard 42nd Rainbow Division.
Emma Donnelly
Emma Donnelly is a fourth-year undergraduate and John V. Lombardi Scholar at the University of Florida, where she is working on majors in History and Spanish and minors in Latin American Studies and Anthropology. After completing an ethnographic field school in Ecuador in 2019, she was motivated to seek community-based humanities research, which led her to enroll in an oral history research seminar taught by Dr. Ortiz. From there, she started working with SPOHP as an intern and subsequently was hired to the team. At SPOHP, she works primarily with the Joel Buchanan Archive and social media teams. In addition to SPOHP, Emma works for UF’s Center for Undergraduate Research and researches with UF’s Spanish Heritage Language Lab.
Jessica Alvarez
Jessica Alvarez is a third-year undergraduate student at UF and has been working with SPOHP for since Fall 2020. She plans to graduate in Spring 2022 with a double major in history and Spanish and a minor in Latin American studies. At SPOHP, she and Alana Gomez produced the ten-episode “Race and Remembrance” Podcast Series to highlight interviews from the Joel Buchanan Archive (or JBA Collection). She also co-coordinates the social media team and helps create curriculum focused on local Black history for public schools, as well as transcribing efforts. After graduating, she plans to attend graduate school to further study Latin American and Caribbean history. Outside of school, she is the coordinator for Children Beyond Our Borders, a non-profit organization aimed at empowering underprivileged children through education, and is passionate about promoting equality and justice.
2021
Kasamba Kokayi, Transcriptionist for the African American History Project
Kasamba Kokayi is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in communications with a focus on photojournalism. Kasamba first joined SPOHP in the summer of 2019 working as a transcriber for transcripts from the African American History Project (AAHP). Kasamba plans on pursuing a career in entertainment photography after graduation.
Omar Sanchez, Latinx Diaspora in the Americas Project
Omar Sanchez is a recent graduate from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He has been part of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program for a few years as a volunteer, intern, and research assistant. Omar is currently the coordinator for the Mississippi Freedom Project, part of the Black Recruitment and Retention interviewing team, a research assistant within the Machen Florida Opportunity Scholars Program Oral History Project, and a member of the Joel Buchanan Project.
Rachel Hujsa, African American History Project, Alachua County Truth and Reconciliation Project
Rachel Hujsa is a third-year undergrad at the University of Florida from Fort Myers, Florida. She is double-majoring in Music with a focus on oboe performance and history. Rachel first joined SPOHP in Spring 2019 as an intern working for the African American History Project, where she interviewed prominent African American music professors at UF. She began working for SPOHP in Fall 2019 as a transcriptionist and is working for the Alachua County Truth and Reconciliation Project. She is interested in musicology and ethnomusicology, as well as American History.
2020
Jennifer Romero, JBA Archivist and Program Videographer
Jennifer Romero graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor’s degree in Telecommunications, with emphasis in production, in the Summer of 2019. Having worked at SPOHP for four years, Jennifer has transcribed and audit-edited hundreds of transcripts for the African American History Project, now dubbed the Joel Buchanan Project. She’s also co-founded the Melrose Project, which entails trips to Melrose, Florida to document the history of the town and its people.
Due to her love for film and television, Jennifer aids Deborah Hendrix with audio optimization and video recording in order to create and preserve content for the program. Her most notable work has been the Washington D.C. trip of January 2017, where she filmed footage for both the Presidential inauguration and the Women’s March on Washington. Jennifer continues working on projects, and has recently been put in charge of a documentary called, “The Odyssey of Oscar Mack.”
2019
Dr. Elaine Sponholtz, Digital Productions and Archival Management Coordinator
Dr. Elaine Sponholtz is an artist-scholar, whose research is concerned with the intersection of storytelling, social memory, and creative uses of technology. Dr. Sponholtz holds a B.A. in Communication Design. After working as a designer, she returned to academia to earn a MLIS, as well as a Master’s in Digital Arts and Sciences. Her thesis project, an original play set in 19 th century Florida, was the first to be performed in the immersive REVE Theater at Digital World’s Institute. A member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, she has received a FLAS Fellowship to study Czech culture in Prague, and UF Graduate School’s Doctoral Research Travel Grant to conduct dissertation research in Europe. In 2017 she graduated with a doctorate in Mass Communications from the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. Her research and creative projects involving storytelling and media design have been presented internationally. A Florida native, she has been affiliated with SPOHP since 2012 as an oral history interviewer, media creator, and technologist.
Holland Hall, Florida Queer History Project Coordinator
Holland Hall graduated from the University of Floridal magna cum laude in Spring 2016 with a bachelor’s of arts in History. After graduating, she began working at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. Holland co-founded the program’s Florida Queer History Project in June 2016, and served as the research coordinator for the program’s Women’s March on Washington Experiential Learning Fieldwork Trip in collaboration with the UF Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research. Holland is currently pursuing an M.Ed./ Ed.S. degree in Mental Health Counseling at the University of Florida, and is a Digital and Public Humanities intern at the George A. Smather’s Libraries at UF.
Ann Smith, Veterans History Project Coordinator
Ann Smith joined SPOHP in 1998, after retiring from a distinguished career in Nursing Education and administration in Acute Care hospitals. She is the Coordinator of the Veterans’ History Project Coordinator and facilitated the interviewing of World War II veterans. So far, the project has conducted over 274 interviews.
Ann worked on all levels of interview processing for the VHP project, including interviewing, transcribing, audit editing, indexing, and supervising volunteer workers on the project. Her work was recently featured in Gainesville Sun, “Retired? Hardly. Woman immersed in collecting stories of local WWII Vets.”
Ann began at SPOHP transcribing interviews with the Seminole tribe, as well as St. Johns River Water Management District and Florida Judges Project. She also coordinated work for the University of Florida College of Nursing (UFCN) Project. Ann also chaired the Oral History Program at the Matheson Museum in Gainesville and supervised an oral history transcription program at the Alachua County Womens’ Prison.
As a former board member, she is a member of the Collections Committee of the Matheson Museum and serves as a citizen member of the Florida Bar Grievance Committee of the Eighth Judicial Circuit. She is a member of the Writers Alliance of Gainesville.
In Fall 2015, Ann presented at the annual Oral History Association conference in Tampa, FL on the panel, “Veterans of WWII Tell Their Stories,” using oral histories from the Veterans History Project. After more than 20 wonderful years of service, she retired from SPOHP duties recently.
Samantha Crisanti, Mississippi Freedom Project and African American History Project
Samantha Crisanti is an undergraduate student, majoring in Political Science and Economics with a minor in Women’s Studies. Sam first joined SPOHP in Summer 2018 as a field researcher for the annual Mississippi Freedom Project trip. Shortly after, she became a SPOHP staff member in Fall Semester 2018 as a student assistant for the African American History Project (AAHP) working predominantly as a transcriber and logistics assistant for the 2019 African American Oral History Symposium. In addition to her work with AAHP, Sam is co-coordinating the 2019 Mississippi Freedom Project trip. Her research interests center on the intersections of race and gender within the juvenile justice system, and the institutional barriers that perpetuate juvenile injustice. Sam plans to attend law school and practice in the field of civil rights. In conjunction with her work at SPOHP, she was the lead undergraduate researcher for the Equal Rights Amendment project at Southern Legal Counsel, a non-profit, civil rights law firm in Gainesville, as well as an advocate for survivors of domestic violence at Peaceful Paths.
Cheyenne Cheng, Art of Aging and Asian American History Project Coordinator
Cheyenne Cheng is a fourth year psychology student at the University of Florida. She first joined SPOHP through the class, “The Black and Latinx History of the Gator Nation” and later came on as a student assistant in Summer 2018. In addition to co-coordinating the Art of Aging and the Asian American History Project, she also works on the Disability History in Florida Project and on the IBC & La Casita Documentaries. Cheyenne’s interests lies in her multi-ethnic roots. As a Chinese-Philipina American, she strives to prioritize the voices of communities less visible.
Juliette Barbera, African American History Project and Graduate Student Assistant
Juliette Barbera is a jointly-appointed graduate assistant with the African American Studies Program and the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. They are a doctoral student, whose research takes on an anti-racist research approach to crime and crime policy by studying crime and crime politics from an institutional perspective, opposed to the traditional behavioral perspectives. Specifically, how the emergence and development of political institutions determine what policy platforms are made available; that is, in respect to crime policies, how does the structure of American political institutional limit policies toward racial justice. Alongside the institutional perspective, Juliette aims to incorporate a people’s perspective on crime policy and politics as to decolonize the narratives on racialized policy as a socially- necessary consequence resulting from individual behaviors.
The interest in institutional perspectives informs their work at SPOHP. As a research assistant for the African American History Project, in addition to assisting in collections processing for the unveiling of the AAHP symposium for spring 2019, they have also taken a lead in aiding AAHP in its documentation of the Black experience at UF. Through the documentation of these experiences, they are interested in understanding how the historical institutional development of universities may promote or limit the institutionalization of Black spaces within white-serving institutions. That is, how the presence or absence of platforms that are institutionalized on campuses informs how inclusion and diversity are understood and practiced through the units, the policies, and the spaces that exist. These perspectives intend to highlight a broader introspection on how institutional structures impact the institutionalization, or lack thereof, for racial equity. Due to the often-dominant amnesia or obscuration of historical institutional marginalization, and its continued perpetuation, Juliette was the first member of SPOHP to propose a documentary about the Institute of Black Culture (IBC), that is inclusive to the context of its founding and its subsequent development, a suggestion which has now become incorporated into the Black and Latinx course of spring 2018 that she is co-teaching and co-developing.
Brenda Stroud, Confederate Monuments of America Project Coordinator
Brenda Stroud is the coordinator of the Federal Judges Project and the Confederate Monuments of America Project. She is an undergraduate student in the Honors History Department at the University of Florida with a focus on Southern History. Her study interests are in political history and social justice specific to the American South. Her current archival research includes radical figures of the Reconstruction era and segregationists of the Civil Rights era both inside the history of North Carolina. Her research specific to the national Confederate monument controversy led to the development of the Confederate Monuments of America Project, and as its Coordinator she leads fieldwork teams to Confederate monument protest events in Gainesville, Florida, and the surrounding areas.
Brenda is a Florida native from Jacksonville. She began working with SPOHP in September 2016 as a visiting student from Santa Fe College. She traveled as a fieldwork representative with the Mississippi Freedom Project to Tallahassee, Florida, Montgomery, Alabama, and to the Mississippi Delta. She was an intern at SPOHP in the spring of 2018 focusing on Latino and African American History. Brenda works with the Women’s March on Washington Project as a research coordinator and collaborator for the production, Voices of the March. From her fieldwork trips to D.C. for both the Women’s March on Washington and the Equality March for Unity and Pride, Brenda has presented on several panel discussions.
Roberto G. Muñoz-Pando, Jews in El Salvador Project and Grace Marketplace Oral History Initiative Researcher
Roberto G. Muñoz-Pando, a native of Puerto Rico, holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, as well as a Master’s Degree in Archaeology from the Center of Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. As a current UF doctoral student in Anthropology, he is completing a dissertation on “The Anthropological Theory of Value in Puerto Rico during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” He works as a Researcher at SPOHP on both the Jews in El Salvador Project and the Grace Marketplace Oral History Initiative. Additionally, he has helped with digitalization of materials, has participated in a Porch Creek research trip, and co-lead the fieldwork trip to Virginia as a part of the Fieldwork in Folklore Project. Roberto also works with Graduate Students United as a Release Timer.
Toni-Lee Maitland, Independent Historian and Web Developer
Toni-Lee Maitland is a history graduate from the University of Florida who worked with SPOHP as a transcriber and historian during her undergraduate career. After graduating from UF, she served one year with AmeriCorps as a City Year ELA Interventionist at a local Miami high school. Working with high schoolers on improving their academic and personal achievements led her to become a full-time, middle and high school Social Studies teacher for three years. During this time, Toni-Lee maintained a steady interest in technology and web design, taking a class here and there while she worked. It wasn’t until an unforeseen pause in her teaching career that she decided to pursue web design and development full-time. Now, Toni-Lee works as a web developer at an IT company in South Florida. She currently has an interest in exploring the experiences that other members of the Black diaspora have had in the technology field, and the challenges they faced getting there. She plans to work on a project exploring this very topic in the coming year.
For additional information, contact SPOHP, call the offices at (352) 392-7168, and connect with us online today.