The 2023 Oral History Summer Institute

Adrienne Cain, MLS, CA, is a librarian, oral historian, and certified archivist who serves as the assistant director of the Institute for Oral History and senior lecturer at Baylor University. In her role, she supports the Institute by providing training and workshops to community groups, students, educators, and researchers interested in oral history interviewing and research. Her oral history projects and research center around ethical and legal considerations for oral history as well as the Black/African American experience as told through oral histories.

Dr. Alessandro Portelli has taught American Literature at the Universities of Siena and Rome "La Sapienza" from 1973 to 2012. He is the founder of the Circolo Gianni Bosio, an independent activist organization for oral history, folk music, and people's culture. Among his awards are the University of Tel Aviv’s David Prize (2015), the Weatherford Prize for Appalachian literature (2012), the United States Oral History Association Book of the Year Price (2005), and, in Italy, the prestigious Viareggio Book Award in 1999.  He has served as Advisor on Historical Memory to the Mayor of Rome (2005-8) and is currently working on a project on the music of immigrants in Italy.

Andrew Chernevych is Archivist at the Galt Museum & Archives in Lethbridge, Alberta. He has worked in this position for 12 years, with previous experience from the Provincial Archives of Alberta and City of Wetaskiwin Archives. At the Galt, Andrew is responsible for preservation and management of historical records related to the Southwest Alberta, which is a traditional and ancestral land of Blackfoot people, particularly the Kainai First Nation and the Piikani First Nation. In addition to preservation and public access, Andrew Chernevych oversees public programing, exhibits, media outreach and teaching.

Ann Meekitjuk Hanson is a writer, translator, broadcaster, civil servant, and owner of the business R.L. Hanson Construction Ltd. She was the founding editor of the newspaper Inukshuk News in addition to being a councillor, a deputy mayor, a community development worker, and a film actress. Hanson was deputy commissioner of the Northwest Territories from 1987 to 1992 and the commissioner of Nunavut from 2005 to 2010

Dr. Athena Elafros is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge. She is a qualitative cultural sociologist who studies popular music, social inequality, and youth. With Tif Semach she is collecting and preserving the oral histories of Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA)/Queer-Straight Alliance (QSA) members and facilitators in Alberta, Canada.

Beth Greenhorn has an MA in Canadian Art History from Carleton University. She is a Senior Project Manager at Library and Archives Canada (LAC). From 2003-2017, she managed Project Naming, a nationally and internationally recognized community-based initiative involving the digitization of photographs depicting First Nations, Inuit and the Métis Nation.

Dr. Carol Payne is a professor of art history and associate dean (research and international) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University. A historian of photography, she is author of The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Andrea Kunard) of The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) among other publications.

Photo: front row: Beth Greenhorn, Deborah Kigjugalik Webster; back row: Christina Williamson, Carol Payne

Dr. Christina Williamson is an independent public historian and research officer at the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. She was formerly a research associate at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, for the Métis Archival Project. She has a PhD in cultural mediations at Carleton University, where her dissertation examined the history of Inuit women’s labour history through the lens of sewing, material culture, and Oral History.  

Photo: front row: Beth Greenhorn, Deborah Kigjugalik Webster; back row: Christina Williamson, Carol Payne

Darcy Tamayose is a PhD student in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought under the supervision of Drs. Carly Adams (UofL) and Darren Aoki (Plymouth University UK). Her study examines the Okinawan Canadian diaspora. Tamayose’s MA (History) thesis, supervised by Dr. Gideon Fujiwara, explored the kika nisei journey of Naoko Shimabukuro which spanned from southern Alberta to Hamahiga Island with focus on the Okinawan Canadian civilian frontline experience during the Second World War Battle of Okinawa.

Deborah Kigjugalik Webster is an anthropologist and Curator of Heritage Collections, Government of Nunavut. She is also a writer of many published articles and two books including Harvaqtuurmiut Heritage: The Heritage of the Inuit of the Lower Kazan River, a book about the archaeology, oral history, and place names research conducted near her home community of Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake) in Nunavut, and Akilak’s Adventure, a children’s book.

Photo: front row: Beth Greenhorn, Deborah Kigjugalik Webster; back row: Christina Williamson, Carol Payne

Eleni Polychronakos is a PhD candidate at Concordia University’s Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities. She is also a writer and teacher. She holds a Masters in Literature (McGill, 2000) and one in Journalism (UBC, 2007). Under the supervision of Dr. Barbara Lorenzkowski, Eleni is currently writing her dissertation, which is tentatively titled “Girl’s Name: Seeking Narratives of Feminist Genealogy in Twentieth-Century Greece.” This SSHRC-funded research creation project uses oral history and literary criticism as both theory and methodology to collect, create, and analyze stories by and about women who came of age during Greece’s turbulent twentieth century.

Dr. Farina King, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is the Horizon Chair of Native American Ecology and Culture and Associate Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, homelands of the Hasinais, or Caddo Nation, and Kirikirʔi:s, or Wichita & Affiliated Tribes. She received her PhD at Arizona State University in History. She has facilitated oral histories with Diné boarding school survivors, involving former students of the Intermountain Indian School, Crownpoint Indian Boarding School, Tuba City Boarding School, Leupp Boarding School, and Kayenta Boarding School. King also writes about Native American and Indigenous Latter-day Saint experiences, working with the Latter-day Saint Native American Oral History Project.

Dr. Heather Stanley is an Assistant Professor at the University of Lethbridge. After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan with her PhD in 2013 she was a postdoctoral fellow at both the University of Alberta and Memorial University of Newfoundland. Primarily a historian of the body Dr. Stanley’s most recently published monogaph is Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2023), which examines the sex lives of women during Canada’s baby boom.

Dr. Jodie Asselin is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. She has a background in human geography and cultural anthropology, with a PhD from the University of Alberta where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the department of family medicine. Her current research examines the intersection of upland livelihood in rural Ireland and green policy.

Dr. Katrina Srigley (she/her) lives and works on Nbisiing Nishnaabeg territory, lands protected by the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850. She is grateful to live and work on these lands. Srigley is a Professor in the Department of History at Nipissing University, co-editor of the award-winning collection Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First century (Routledge 2018) and author of the award-winning monograph Breadwinning Daughters: Young Working Women in a Depression-era City (U of T 2010).

Khadija Baker is interdisciplinary artist who creates installations that combine video/moving images, fiber, digital art, sound and animation. Through experimental work she explores social and political themes related persecution, displacement and memory. Her current research combines these practices to create intimate site-specific sculptural installation environments that engage the senses (sight, sound, and touch.)  Her work breaches the divide between artist, art and public, creating an active space of participation, exchange, understanding and storytelling.

Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is a Huculak Chair in Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, and the director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. Cultural anthropologist by training, and a long-term practitioner of oral history, Natalia’s research primarily focuses on diaspora studies, labour migration, Western Canada, Ukrainian Canadian culture and Ukraine.

Dr. Rhonda Y. Williams is a Professor of History and the John L. Seigenthaler Chair in American History at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on low-income black women’s and marginalized people’s experiences, everyday lives, politics, and social struggles. She is the author of the award-winning The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004) and Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (2015), as well as numerous articles and essays, including her classic, “I’m a Keeper of Information: History-Telling and Voice,” in the Oral History Review (2001), and the more recently published, “Places Created & Peopled: ‘Black Women: Where they be ... suffering?’,” Journal of Urban History (2020) and “History Teaches Us to Resist: A Conversation with the Author Dr. Mary Frances Berry,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights (2021).

Dr. Apooyak’ii, Tiffany Prete (nee Hind Bull) is a member of the Kainai (Blood Tribe) of the Siksikasitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy), located in the Treaty 7 area. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge. Her program of work is comprised of implementing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action on the Blood Reserve. Her area of expertise includes: Indigenous secondary retention rates within the public school system, Blackfoot historical research, impacts of colonization, intergenerational trauma, and Indigenous research methodologies.