Nicole Yapp, Mississippi Freedom Project and Art of Aging
Nicole Yapp is a recent graduate of the University of Florida with a BA in History, African American Studies and International Studies. She has been awarded President’s Honor Roll, Dean’s List, and was a University Scholars (2017). Nicole joined SPOHP in 2017 as a researcher for the Mississippi Freedom Project. After participating in that trip, she volunteered with SPOHP before being brought on as a student assistant. Her interest in social justice and civil rights is what fuels her work with SPOHP. She completed her thesis entitled “Labor Exploitation, Racism and Oppression: Convict Labor in Florida From 1960 to 2010.” She aspires to be a public service attorney specializing in civil and human rights litigation. Nicole is currently a Cleveland Foundation Public Service Fellow.
Anupa Kotipoyna, Trinidad Study Abroad Coordinator
Anupa Kotipoyina graduated from the University of Florida in Spring 2017 with a bachelor’s degree and received the Michael Hauptman Medal for an outstanding senior majoring in history. She first joined SPOHP in Fall 2015 as an intern and joined the SPOHP staff in Fall 2016 as a student assistant. She has participated in the 2016 Mississippi Freedom Project and Women’s March on Washington fieldwork trips as well as assisted with a range of projects, including the African American History Project, Poarch Creek Project, and Latinx Diaspora in the Americas Project. In addition to transcribing and audit-editing for various projects at SPOHP, Anupa assists with grant writing and podcast production. She also collects stories from Indian immigrants about their diverse experiences in the United States and other countries.
Raja Rahim, African American History Project Coordinator
Raja Rahim serves as a Coordinator of the African American History Project, and began working at SPOHP in Spring 2016. She is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Florida. As an American historian, her research focuses on the participation of African Americans in the development of American sports culture.
A native of Richmond, Virginia, she arrived to U.F. via North Carolina. She received a M.A. in History from North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina in May of 2015. She also received a B.A. in History from NCCU in 2012.
Her current research explores the coaching career of John B. McLendon and the origins of black basketball in North Carolina during the era of segregation. In addition, she is currently researching the life and athletic career of Ronald Coleman and the history of athletic integration at the University of Florida in the late 1960s.
Oliver Telusma, Panama Canal Project Coordinator
Oliver Telusma, who graduated with a political science undergrad degree at the University of Florida, joined SPOHP in spring of 2016 as a volunteer to finish the Panama Canal Museum project, and was brought on as a Project Coordinator in May of 2016. His interest in studying and bringing reform to power structures in order to help disadvantaged and disenfranchised communities has not only led him to further commit his time to SPOHP but has also inspired his spoken word as well as led him to become a fellow for Young People For (YP4), an initiative under the People for an American Way Foundation. Oliver is planning a future as a attorney, educator and public servant, explaining, “it is important to take the time to honor the bastions of the struggle, and the people who have bought my goals closer into reach.”
Austyn Szempruch, Poarch Creek Transcriptionist
Austyn Szempruch graduated from the University of Florida in May of 2016. After graduating with honors with a degree in History, he joined SPOHP in the spring of 2014 as an intern, working on the Virginia Tidewater, Black Pittsburgh, and Panama Canal collections. After three semesters of interning and graduation, he was hired as an assistant for the Poarch Creek Project, transcribing and creating audio logs of recordings. Austyn has also been a part of SPOHP’s fieldwork trips, being a part of one of the Virginia Fieldwork in Folklore research trips in 2014 and the Appalachian Social Change research trip in 2015. In August 2018 Austyn began a Master’s degree program in Sports Journalism at University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communication.
Jefferey Pufahl, Visiting Scholar, 2017-2018
Jeffrey Pufahl,with a professional background in film and theatre directing and producing, holds an MFA in Theater Performance (University of Cincinnati) and an MFA in Theater Directing (University of Victoria). His work at the University of Florida was focused on creating inter-campus and inter-community partnerships to develop theatre-based programming that addresses social issues and community health. A member of the UF Imagining America cohort, Jeffrey specializes in creating site-specific theater and documentary film. His research focuses on innovatively applying theatre and video to health, social, and educational content in order to engage audience more effectively.
His projects include Ashley’s Consent, a multi-media, site-specific applied theatre experience educating on sexual assault and consent, and Telling: Gainesville, an original verbatim theatre project connecting the oral histories of Gainesville Veterans with community for the purpose of facilitating dialogue and understanding. He built on an existing partnership between SPOHP and the Center for Women’s Studies, to help students translate their interviews from the January 2017 Inauguration and Women’s March on Washington DC into an original theatrical presentation.
Patrick Daglaris, Poarch Creek Project Staff
Patrick Daglaris is a graduate of the University of Florida. In spring of 2015, he graduated with a History major and a Jazz Guitar minor. Patrick joined SPOHP as an intern in the spring of 2014, working on the Andersonville, Black Pittsburgh, Retired Faculty of the University of Florida, and Panama Canal collections. After his second semester interning at SPOHP in the Fall of 2014, he was hired to assist in the Poarch Creek Project, organizing and transcribing Hugh Rozelle’s audio records.
Patrick has worked on several fieldwork trips, including the Virginia Fieldwork in Folklore research trips in October 2014 and October 2015, the Appalachian Social Change research trip in February 2015, and the Mississippi Freedom Project’s annual research trip in the Summer of 2015. Patrick plans to pursue a graduate degree.
In Fall 2015, Patrick presented at the annual OHA conference in Tampa, FL on the panel, “Standing with Elders: Fieldwork in the South,” using oral histories from the Virginia Tidewater Main Street Project. After completing a Master’s degree in Library Science, Patrick went on to work as an academic librarian at Oklahoma State University.
Venetia Ponds, African American History Project Coordinator
Venetia Ponds received her B.A. in Anthropology at the University of Washington where she specialized in the Anthropology of Globalization: The study of today’s increasingly interconnected and multicultural world, focusing on both contemporary and historical patterns of global exchange. Her M.A. which focused on perceptions of race and racism within the U.S. society and how media provides a distorted reality of social equality and mobility that intensify beliefs that race (as a significant feature of identity) and racism are things of the past was acquired from the Anthropology department at UF.
Congruent with her pursuit of a PhD, Venetia teaches a course in Visual Ethnography. Her dissertation’s overarching interest is in the effects of the transformative property of social movement/social justice volunteerism. Venetia’s grounding in anthropology provides ideal tools for making sense of the human condition as how this transformative experience impacts the life-courses of the volunteers can only be told by them. Most precisely, her dissertation uses the narratives of the white volunteers of the Civil Rights Movement to uncover lasting personal effects of social justice volunteerism.
As a visual anthropologist her interest lies in the relationship of media to audience. Therefore her dissertation includes an educational documentary on the meaning that social justice work has on its participants.
Currently Venetia is a Research Assistant at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.
Robert Baez, Florida Queer History Project Coordinator
Robert Baez, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida, completed his B.A. degree in Public Communication at Florida Atlantic University, where he focused on community organizing and social movements. He received his M.A. degree in Women’s Studies from the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research at the University of Florida. Robert’s research interests focus generally on the intersection between gender, sexuality, and race.
Robert first started at SPOHP as a volunteer in January 2017 when he conducted interviews at the Women’s March on Washington and the presidential inauguration. Since then, he organized a research trip to Washington, D.C. for the Equality March for Unity and Pride (June 2017), and was brought on as a Project Coordinator for the Florida Queer History Project. His work has been featured on the Oxford University Press Blog.