The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program partners with sponsoring institutions to promote emerging oral history research, and supports scholarly with the Robert Zieger Scholarship Fund and bi-yearly Julian Pleasants Travel Award.
Dr. Julian C. Chambliss, Julian Pleasants Fellow, 2017
Dr. Julian Chamblis is a professor of History at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and is primarily known as a scholar of the real and imagined city and on comics. He serves as coordinator of the Africa and African-American Studies Program at Rollins. He is the Coordinator of the Media, Arts, and Culture Special Interest Section for the Florida Conference of Historians. His work is in critical making; notable projects include Project Mosaic: Zora Neale Hurston, Advocate Recovered, and Oscar Mack.
Dr. Chambliss’s teaching interests focus on urban development and popular culture in the United States. In particular, he’s concerned how perceptions of urban space shape individual and communal interactions. His published work has examined these issues through community activism linked to city plans and through the imagery in comics and other popular culture mediums.
Jeffrey Pufahl, Visiting Scholar, 2017
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 is 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.
Recent projects include his award winning production of 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 has also developed several applied theatre workshops for teens; topics include stress and coping mechanisms. Jeffrey is also developing a unique theatre program for adolescents and young adults with mental health conditions in collaboration with Chicago’s Second City. Currently, he is building on an existing partnership between SPOHP and the Center for Women’s Studies, to help students translate their collected research and interviews from the January 2017 Inauguration and Women’s March on Washington DC into an original theater/multi-media presentation.
Dr. Fíliz Sonmez , Visiting Scholar in Residence, 2016-17
Dr. Fíliz Sonmez received her B. Arch. Degree from the Department of Architecture at Erciyes University in 2000 and her M. Arch. degree from the Department of Architecture at METU in 2006; she completed her Ph.D. in Architectural History at Yıldız Technical University in 2012, Istanbul, Turkey. She studied at the University of Florida, USA, School of Architecture as a visiting scholar in 2010. Her areas of interests are domestic architecture, interior design, architectural and oral history and theory of modern architecture. She was a visiting scholar for her postdoctoral studies at La Sapienza University, Rome in 2013. While there, she researched architect Luigi Moretti’s 1950 Casa “Il Girasole” within the concept of interior design and domestic space. As a visiting scholar at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida between 2016-2017 she conducted research in the Duck Pond District for a historical preservation project. Filiz is also in the process of applying for another visiting position with us in the future.
Ford Foundation Visiting Scholar Dr. Perla Guerrero
The 2014 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship was awarded to Dr. Perla M. Guerrero, assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Guerrero is the first core faculty member of the university’s U.S. Latina/o Studies Program. The fellowship allows Guerrero to dedicate herself fully to her upcoming book, tentatively titled “Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place.” Over the 2014-2015 academic year, she is working with Dr. Paul Ortiz.
Dr. Guerrero received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California in 2010. Her research and teaching interests lie comparative race and ethnicity, immigration, space and place, labor, and 20th century U.S. history. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work is informed by historical methods and human geography as they pertain to Latina/o Studies, American Studies, and the U.S. South. In 2013, Dr. Guerrero was a Latino Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow as well as Goldman Sachs Junior Fellow at the National Museum of American History. Guerrero considers her Ford Foundation achievement “indicative of the need to understand what’s going on in the South— the legacies of Southern histories. Issues around race are not unique to the South, but the history of the South plays a role in these discourses.”
For more information, see the full University of Maryland press release, “Perla M. Guerrero Wins Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.”