Sarah McNamara
Sarah McNamara graduated from UF in 2010. She worked at SPOHP as an academic intern in 2008 and 2009.
Sarah was awarded of the Leland Hawes Prize in Florida History for her essay, “How to Make an American: The Americanization of Ybor City’s Latin Community.” She was also the recipient of the 2012 Julian Pleasants Award, which brought her back to SPOHP to conduct research on the history of Latina women’s activism in the South.
Sarah is currently studying for her PhD in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is a graduate research assistant at the Southern Oral History Program.
Stacey Nelson
Stacey Nelson graduated from the University of Florida in 2009. She attended the Mississippi Freedom Project research trip, interviewing civil rights veterans and residents of the Delta.
Stacey is a former All-American pitcher for the Florida Gators softball team and is considered one of the best pitchers in NCAA softball history, winning numerous awards including Southeastern Conference Player of the Year (2008-2009). She pitched for the United States women’s national softball team in 2009 and 2010 and attends Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
Diane Fischler
Diane Fischler worked at SPOHP for nine years (2000-2009) as an editor, historian, and writer, first as a volunteer and eventually a staff member. Diane edited of transcripts, created indexes, and basically worked on all stages editing of written items, including for Dr. Proctor’s and Dr. Pleasants’s books. She also helped to get all the transcripts online for the massive digitizing project of 2005-2006.
One of Diane’s main duties was summarizing the oral histories in the program’s World War II collection. In 2008, she suggested to colleague Deborah Hendrix that they make a documentary based on four of those WWII-related oral histories. These four veterans all gave similar accounts of their experiences as POWs held by the Japanese. The result was a SPOHP-produced documentary titled “I Just Wanted to Live.” Diane wrote the script for the film and narrated it, while Deborah connected the varying POW themes against a backdrop of graphic war footage and photos related to the prisoners’ horrific war experiences.
The documentary is now housed in the educational resources archives of several museums across the country, including the National POW Museum in Andersonville, Georgia; the National World War II Museum in New Orleans; and the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas.
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