Kyle Bridge
Kyle Bridge joined SPOHP in 2015 as a graduate coordinator, instructing undergraduate interns in oral history methods and transcribing workflow, and worked for SPOHP in the spring and fall semesters.
Before coming to UF, Kyle received his BA in History from the University of North Florida in 2012, and also received his MA from UNF in 2014. Kyle’s work there centered on US international drug policy, the relationship between drug use prevalence and crime rates in Jacksonville since 1971, and local oral histories of addiction.
At UF, Kyle is a history PhD student under advisor Dr. Joseph Spillane. He is broadly interested in the contested definition of “addiction,” particularly the concept of the “addictive personality.” He has published relevant work in the SAGE Encyclopedia of Pharmacology and Society and Alpata (2015, both forthcoming) and is the Assistant Managing Editor for Points, the official blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.
Ryan Thompson, Graduate Internship Coordinator
Ryan Thompson is a doctoral student in history at UF, focusing on environmental history and the history of drugs. After graduating with a B.A. in American Studies at his hometown New College of Florida in 2009, writing a thesis on the persistency of anarchism in the United States, he lived in the great Gulf Coast city of New Orleans before coming to UF in 2015 as a graduate student. In the Crescent City he taught yoga at both a studio and as a volunteer to persons caught up in the penal system. In his own research he wonders about questions like: how did changing environmental attitudes shape attitudes toward death and dying? How has drug production and consumption changed physical landscapes? And what can one family tell us about the continuities between anti-racist and pro-environment ethics in the American South? Outside school, Ryan loves to be out in the “archives” of what’s left of wild Florida, its springs and swamps and other places of flourishing but threatened flora and fauna. Coming to SPOHP has been a poignant journey for Ryan, as he was first recommended to the program by a dear mentor, the late UF professor of history Alan Petigny (1965-2013). He’s grateful to all of those who tell their stories and allow others the privilege of practicing the endangered skill of listening.
Dr. Jessica Taylor
Jessica Taylor was a graduate coordinator at SPOHP starting in Fall 2013, where she taught the internship class and work on transcripts. Jessica graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2009 with a BA in History and Anthropology. After finishing her MA in Comparative History at William and Mary in 2010, she moved to Gainesville to start the PhD program under Drs. Juliana Barr, Jon Sensbach, and Paul Ortíz.
Jessica’s research focuses on early Native American history with a focus on the Chesapeake and material culture. Her interests include historic preservation, community engagement, and ways to engage high school and undergraduate students in history and activism. She was recently awarded the Simons Early American History Department Award in Spring 2014, and the Lillian Gary Taylor Fellowship in American Literature from the University of Virginia and Mellon Fellowship in Spring 2015. Outside of graduate school, Jess works as a park ranger at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in North Carolina and spends her summers working on oral history projects related to preservation in Florida, Virginia, and Massachusetts. In Summer 2014, Jessica taught as an instructor at the College of William & Mary for the National Institute of American History‘s pre-collegiate program on democracy.
In Fall 2014, she organized the inaugural Virginia Fieldwork in Folklore research trip, leading a team of interns, SPOHP staff and graduate students to eastern Virginia to record oral histories focusing on folklore, traditional crafts, and rural development with residents of Mathews and Middlesex Counties, and will bring a return group to the region in October 2015. She also coordinated the Appalachian Social Change Project research trip in February 2015 with Lees-McRae College.
In Fall 2014, Jessica presented at the annual Oral History Association conference in Madison, WI on the panel, “Suffering in Silence: Counteracting Myths of Passivity through Narratives of Resistance,” using oral histories with black men and women to discuss the limitations of violence enacted symbolically in white spaces.
In Fall 2015, Jessica presented at the annual OHA conference in Tampa, FL on the panel, “Standing with Elders: Fieldwork in the South,” using oral histories from the Appalachian Social Change Project. She accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Public Histo
Génesis Lara
Génesis Lara is the founding coordinator of the Latina/o Diaspora in the Americas Project. She graduated with high honors from the University of Florida with a degree in history and a minor in Latin American studies in 2014. Her undergraduate thesis, “The Forgotten Revolution: Memory, Politics and the Anti-Colonial Struggle in the Dominican Republic, 1961-1966,” shed light on the importance of this revolution to Latin America and global Cold War politics.
Génesis joined the staff at SPOHP as a transcriber doing Spanish language translation after working as an intern. She was the Executive Director for the 2013 Hispanic Heritage Month, the largest student-run celebration of Hispanic-Latino Culture in the nation. In Spring 2014, Génesis was inducted into the Hispanic-Latino Hall of Fame.
Génesis presented at the 48th annual Oral History Association Meeting, using her thesis work for SPOHP’s panel “Un-silencing Hispaniola’s Histories: Precedents and Possibilities.” She also presented on a second panel that focused on the Nuestras Historias collection at SPOHP, which features interviews with students, alumni and faculty as they tell the story of Hispanic-Latino community at the University of Florida through the creation of the Institute of Hispanic-Latino cultures and the IHLC’s 20th anniversary celebration at UF. The panel is titled “From Oral History to Community Action: Latino Youth Building Community and Transforming Social Discourses and Institutions.”
Read Génesis’s featured SPOHP biography and explore the Latina/o Diaspora in the Americas Project.
Amelia D’Costa
Amelia D’Costa worked for the African American History Project, and was a field researcher on the 2014 Mississippi Freedom Project trip to Natchez and the Delta. She was a Machen Opportunity Scholar and the recipient of the J.W. Martin and A.M. Phillips Scholarship Fund, graduating in Fall 2014 with a bachelor’s degree.
In December 2015, Amelia will graduate from the masters program of the UF School of Special Education, School Psychology & Early Childhood Studies. She currently teaches third grade with Broward County Public Schools.
Dr. Erin Zavitz
Dr. Erin Zavitz is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Montana Western. Erin received a PhD (2015) in history and a Graduate Certificate in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida, MA (2006) in comparative literature and cultural studies from the University of New Mexico, and BA (2002) in history from Earlham College. At Western, she teaches courses on the history of Latin America, the Caribbean, piracy, and slavery. She is also working on developing a methods course for all history majors which will include oral history training.
Erin’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century Haiti, in particular the construction of Haitian national identity and memory of the Haitian Revolution. In 2011, SPOHP provided a scholarship for Erin to conduct Creole-language oral histories in Haiti to include in the SPOHP archive. The interviews became part of her dissertation “Revolutionary Memories: Celebrating and Commemorating the Haitian Revolution, 1804-2004,” which examined—through printed materials, national holiday festivals, and oral traditions—the contested process of remembering Haiti’s founding. Erin is the author of two book chapters: “Revolutionary Commemorations: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haitian Independence Day, 1804-1904,” in The Haitian Declaration of Independence (2016) and “Encountering Creole genesis in the Haitian Press: Massillon Coicou’s fin-de-siècle feuilleton ‘La Noire,’” in La Española—Isla de Encuentros (2015). Her research journey to archives and libraries in the United States, Haiti, France, and England has received support from the Conference on Latin American History, the Dan David Foundation, the New York Public Library, and the French Government’s Chateaubriand Social Sciences and Humanities Fellowship.
Matthew Simmons
Matthew Simmons is a second year PhD student in the History Department at UF who studies early twentieth century radical agrarian social movements. He joined SPOHP in Spring 2014 as a graduate coordinator managing transcription workflow and organizing SPOHP’s public programs.
Matt received a BA in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2005 and an MA in History from the University of Tulsa in 2013. His MA thesis interrogated early twentieth century agrarian radicalism in Oklahoma and was entitled “Early Twentieth Century Oklahoma Socialism through the Eyes of Oscar Ameringer.” In between his BA and MA. Matt volunteered with AmeriCorps, taught English overseas with WorldTeach in Chile, and worked in the public service sector as a deputy clerk of court and a veterans education claims examiner.
Matt is also a guest blogger for the Oklahoma Policy Institute where his research focuses on issues of social and economic justice as well as prison reform. He recently had two book reviews published in Alpata and the Madison Historical Review, and was solicited by the American Yawp, an online collaborative American history textbook, for an article on early twentieth century socialism which will be published in 2015.
In Fall 2014, Matt presented at the annual Oral History Association conference in Madison, WI on the panel, “Suffering in Silence: Counteracting Myths of Passivity through Narratives of Resistance,” utilizing oral histories gathered from the farmworker community in Apopka, Florida to discuss the tactics agricultural workers have adopted to overcome economic disparities resulting from unfair wages and poor working conditions.
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