Oral History Commons^™

Corazones Urbanos: Literary Cartographies And Southwest Cities In The Mexican American Spatial Imaginary, Jorge A. Hernández Jr.

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

Corazones Urbanos: Literary Cartographies and Southwest Cities in the Mexican American Spatial Imaginary examines how Mexican American writers from Tucson, San Antonio, and Albuquerque narrate, critique, and reimagine urban space across the U.S. Southwest in the twentieth century. Integrating literary studies, cultural geography, urban history, and critical regionalism, the project analyzes responses to racialized development, urban renewal, and gentrification that have displaced Mexican American communities from historic downtowns. Moving beyond borderlands and transnational models, it advances a critically regional approach attentive to local histories, municipal policies, and community pressures shaping urban life. Through close readings of creative and nonfiction texts …

Living Archaeology: A Comparative Perspective On How Archaeologists Can Study And Document The Present, Alia S. Moran

Honors Capstones

Archaeology has long remained a social science that has tended to exclude sustained consideration of contemporary societies in the analysis of material culture. In recent decades, approaches such as ethnoarchaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary have expanded the field to include the study of present-day societies through material culture. Inspired by my involvement in the Thais in Illinois Project, which focused on documenting the Thai American immigrant experience in the greater Chicago area to produce an oral history collection, alongside other goals, this thesis intends to further explore how archaeological practice can be used to understand everyday issues in …

Unmaking And Remaking Crimean Tatar Identity Stalin’S Deportation, Sürgün Stories, And The Claiming Of Indigeneity, Milo A. Clarkson

International Studies Honors Projects

The Crimean Tatars exist within a framework of historical and modern Russian settler colonial oppression. By examining their preferred form of identification, this thesis argues that claiming indigeneity holds promise for combating this colonial structure. Further, it identifies the construction of collective memories of the Sürgün (1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars) in virtual museum project Tamirlar’s oral histories as a form of discursive decolonization—the reclamation of cultural, linguistic, and historical representation and primacy on the land. Novel analysis of fifty interviews with Sürgün survivors preserves indigenous Crimean identity and challenges the retrospective settler colonial construction of Crimea as “Russian.”

Tracings, Masie Sophia Love

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, the artist wonders what it means to remember a time and place that she has not experienced- what would this look like visualized in a painting? Love studies the histories and similarities between cartography and quilting using the two as a kind of channel to understand, record, and remember land. She explores inherited memory and the clues left behind in the form of quilts made by ancestors to create abstracted landscapes and maps of Tennessee where they lived for generations.

Bill Brand Interview By Alex Morris, April 6, 2026, Bill Brand, Alexander Morris

HIST 4798/5798: Recording Memory: Methods and Uses of Oral History

In this 2026 interview, Bill Brand, a former corporate executive and, since 2023, a trustee on the Ohio University Foundation Board, discusses his lifelong connections to Ohio University (OU) and Athens, Ohio. An OU alum, Brand earned a Bachelor of Science from the Scripps College of Communication in 1987. He discusses what about OU—from when he first visited in the early 80s up until now—has continued to entice him into involvement with the university. In particular, he touches on the strong sense of community within both the university and Athens as a whole, which he asserts serves as a safe …

The Brethren In China: Cross-Cultural Relationships Within An Imperial Structure, Sebastian S. Kochall

History and Political Science Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mark Stevens, Mark Stevens

St. Mary's University School of Law

Mark Stevens discusses his time as a law student at St. Mary’s University School of Law as well as his early legal career as a criminal defense attorney. He explains how he helped create the Criminal Justice Clinic and details memorable cases from his time as a supervising attorney there. Mark also discusses his teaching philosophy and how the clinic works with the community.

Oral History Of Ronald Lykins Conducted By Mallory Lough On March 12, 2026, Ronald Lykins, Mallory Lough

HIST 4798/5798: Recording Memory: Methods and Uses of Oral History

Ronald Lykins is a former professor within the College of Business at Ohio University. Raised in rural Adams County, Ohio, in a family facing significant economic hardships, Lykins grew up in a household with no running water or electricity. These early experiences shaped his work ethic, along with giving him a deep appreciation for helping others and granting opportunities. Ron enrolled at Ohio University as a first generation student, graduating with his MBA in 1967 and his PhD in 1971. Following his graduation, Ron developed a career in accounting and financial services, eventually founding his own accounting firm in 1969. …

A History Of Dance At The University Of South Carolina: Celebrating A 50-Year Legacy, Olivia Sherman

Senior Theses

Since its founding in 1976, the University of South Carolina’s Dance Program has developed from a small performance initiative into one of the nation’s leading collegiate dance programs. Despite its artistic achievements and community engagement, little scholarly work has traced the program’s evolution or its impact at USC and the broader South Carolina arts community. Existing documentation is largely preserved in departmental archival materials, most notably the Betsy Blackmon Dance Program Archival Binders, which compile decades of newspaper articles, programs, press releases, and commentary that chronicle the program’s first fifty years. This project investigates how the program has evolved in …

Changing Mercy In Aotearoa New Zealand, Anna Nicholls Victoria University Of Wellington

Journal of Global Catholicism

This paper examines the evolving expression of Catholicity within the Mercy organization in Aotearoa New Zealand. It explores the impact of Vatican II, demographic shifts, and societal changes. Through interviews with lay leaders in Whānau Mercy Ministries, the religiosity, inclusive approach, and the tension between traditional Catholic identity and pluralism in the organization are explored. A pertinent discussion concerns how the organization uses a more secular portrayal of Catherine McAuley as a unifying figure for the religiously diverse audience. The author argues that while secularization influences the organization, it fosters human flourishing and community engagement, offering opportunities for growth rather …

The Untameability Of The Sacred: Votive Traditions At Notre Dame De Lourdes And El Santuario De Chimayó, Gabrielle Bibeau

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article compares divergent votive practices at Notre Dame de Lourdes in France and El Santuario de Chimayó in New Mexico. Lourdes’ embrace of modern aesthetic values—simplicity, order, and functional clarity—has led to the removal and tight regulation of most ex-votos. By contrast, Chimayó’s roots in Latin American Baroque aesthetics, with its emphasis on abundance, drama, and hybridity, create space for a vibrant proliferation of offerings. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetics and politics as the “distribution of the sensible,” the article shows how aesthetic judgments intertwine with clerical power to curate, constrain, and authorize pilgrims’ access to the …

Austrian Again Book Talk, Cardozo Law Institute In Holocaust And Human Rights (Clihhr), Anne Hand, Evelyn Konrad

2025–2026 Flyers

The Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights hosted a special book talk featuring author Anne Hand, discussing her memoir Austrian Again. In her book, Hand explores her journey to uncover her family’s hidden history during the Holocaust while pursuing Austrian citizenship, tracing her Austrian and Czechoslovakian roots through personal stories and historical records.

The program also featured Evelyn Konrad, Cardozo alumna and Holocaust survivor, who joined the conversation and shared her personal reflections. Moderated by Konrad, the event examined themes of identity, migration, heritage, and historical memory.

Charity Simone, Mark Naison, Anthony Abd-Al Shafi Rosado

Oral Histories

Simone’s path to leadership was inspired by her late mentor, Charles Foster, who encouraged her to be an active voice in their community. After seeing issues with building maintenance and a lack of clear communication, Simone ran for office and was elected Treasurer of her Building Association in 2023. Through this role, she noticed that community work is complex and needs navigating different opinions, yet the experience ultimately reinforced her belief that community is a “verb.” To her, it is an intentional, ongoing action that requires showing up every day to hold the system accountable.

A significant aspect of Simone's …

Parallel Concepts Found In The Thousand And One Nights And Sufi Hagiography, Walaa Kamal Emam Kamel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that The Thousand and One Nights functions as more than mere populist entertainment; rather, it constitutes a literary corpus imbued with Sufi mystical epistemologies that reflect the spiritual quests and Sufi concepts evident in hagiographical traditions. Through discourse and intertextual analysis of two Nights stories, “The City of Brass” and “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” alongside Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ, this study demonstrates how shared rhetorical strategies—specifically David Pinault’s Leitwörter analysis and L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience concept—reveal a narrative and rhetorical emphasis on the metamorphosis of the self from worldly attachment toward …

Groove Goes The Distance: An Initial Inquiry Into Jazz Music In Egypt, Farida Gohar

Theses and Dissertations

Jazz music has been a historically contentious site of social, cultural, and political signification. From the violent subjugation that characterized its origins and aspirational freedom that animated its practice, to its transformation into a distinctly “American” music instrumentalized by the US State Department to counter Soviet influence, jazz’s capacity for the inscription of meaning is vast and regularly cause for debate. The particular configuration of jazz music in Egypt is no less complicated although seldom studied. This thesis ventures an initial mapping of the dynamics and negotiations that historically defined the initiation of “Egyptian” jazz, as well as the ones …

News Briefs, Marvin H. Jeter Iii, Joyce Shaw

Mississippi Libraries

News updates from Gunter Library at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory and from the Mississippi Library Commission.

A Crown In Death: An (Expanded) Dramaturgical Approach To The Trojan Women Of Euripides, Stephanie Lester

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

In the action-packed, visually-oriented market for modern media, some may assume a 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy to be slightly past its expiration date, especially if it features little to no action onstage like in Euripides’ The Trojan Women. However, it is important to remember that literature is lost when the world fails to cherish it, so if a text survives that long, it may be worth another cursory glance. In this case, that glance involved a full dramaturgical study featuring qualitative script analysis of multiple translations of The Trojan Women with related texts to explore context, themes, common literary devices, and …

No Tech For Apartheid Memory: Oral Histories Of Google Worker Organizing, Zelda Montes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The NOTA Google NYC Digital Memory Archive is a digital memory project centering the worker narrative in tech labor struggles in the wake of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Rooted in my dual experiences as a Google Software Engineer and a No Tech for Apartheid organizer, this capstone project, initially created in 2024, seeks to combat the silencing around the nature of labor organizing through expanding upon the existing archive to incorporate oral history testimonies of NOTA organizers (notechforapartheidmemory.com/interviews). After conducting 4 oral history interviews with former Google workers currently based in NYC, the videos were …

An Introduction To Oral Traditions And Poetry Of The Baloches, Emran Dorrazehi

English Dissertations - Archive

There is not much known about the history and literature of the Baloches besides the translation and transliteration of Mansel Longworth Dames. Dames while serving as an official in the region wrote a book, Popular Poetry of the Baloches (1907) in two volumes. Dames translated a series of oral poetry of his subjects. This dissertation utilized 13 poems from Dames’ transliterations and employed a compensatory, creative and restorative translation to recreate their earlier states.  It is the assertion of this dissertation that the poems given to Dames by minstrels were already heavily censored to reflect Islamic, Mongol and Mughal identities. …

Laila: A Doll Memoir Of 1947 Partition Of India And Pakistan, Maleeha Malik, Maleeha Fatima Malik

Children's Literature (MFA) Theses

This abstract examines a creative and critical work centered on the 1947 Partition of India, which displaced approximately fourteen million people and caused one million deaths. The narrative introduces Laila, an anthropomorphized doll who functions as both witness and archive, embodying the memories and traumas of multiple child survivors. Through Laila’s journey across India, Pakistan, and the diaspora, the text explores themes of identity, belonging, loss, and intergenerational memory.

Blending personal family history with historical analysis, the author situates Laila within lived experiences of migration, silence, and religious marginalization, particularly as part of the Ahmadi Muslim community. The narrative foregrounds …

The Phenomenon Of Ukrainian Chaplaincy From The Underground Of The 1990s To Officer Ranks In The Historical And Spiritual Experience Of Lieutenant Colonel Of Aviation And Pastor Vasyl Khimich, Valentyna Kuryliak

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

Vasyl Khimich is a career aviation officer, retired lieutenant colonel, and pastor who combined the discipline of a Soviet officer with the spiritual mission of developing educational standards. This interview is about how faith became a strategic resource of national security. The figure of Vasyl Khimich is exceptionally valuable for the history of Protestantism in Ukraine, as he combines the experience of a Soviet career aviation officer, a pastor, and a developer of the first standards of military chaplaincy in Ukraine. His path demonstrates the complex evolution of the Ukrainian military-Christian movement from underground meetings to official recognition at the …

My Autobiography Of Listening: A Worksheet, David Keck

C. Listening for One’s Own Voice

This 1-page worksheet provides a framework for exploring the ways in which a person's experiences shape their listening habits and capacities. It helps users answer the question, "How did I come to listen this way?"

Imagining South Korean Nationhood Through Remembering And Forgetting The South Korean Military In The Vietnam War, Robinson P. Lee

Pitzer Senior Theses

Little more than a decade after being victimized by the devastating Korean War, South Korea fought in another devastating civil war in Asia, the Vietnam War. How is South Korean nationhood and political identity understood and articulated in the face of existential national questions presented by the Vietnam War? This thesis uses social and oral history approaches to put a myriad of primary and secondary sources in conversation with one another, building on the existing, limited English-language literature on South Korean military involvement in the Vietnam War. These approaches include examining narratives of Vietnam War atrocities, of an organized group …

Reawakening Waⁿdat: Community Research & Reclamation, Darcy Allred

Theses and Dissertations

The Wyandot(te) have undergone language dormancy due to settler colonial impacts of warfare, refugee relocation, forced removals, and U.S. assimilation projects. One of the most pressing priorities among our people today is reawakening our ancestral language, Waⁿdat. The common follow-up question is: how? Through the conduit of Waⁿdat language reclamation, this project grapples with the above question in collaboration with the Wyandot(te) community, and in adherence to the tribal sovereignty of the Wyandotte Nation. The project engages with diasporic perspectives, community-based pedagogy design, and tribally specific research protocols and policies. The living collective knowledgebase with which I engage in this …

Art Heals Chicago: Murals On The South Side Of Xicágo, Brenda Rodriguez

Pomona Senior Theses

Mural making as a collective art form is a tool for healing, resistance, and cultural pride in Black and Brown communities. With my focus being on Mexican American communities on the South Side of Chicago, specifically Pilsen. I make ties to indigenous motifs and the history of Mexican Muralism to show how it has evolved and how murals in the 1960s and 70s were used for healing from violence and the revolution. Murals that include images that reference the Mesoamerican past and preconquest life are a powerful way of reclaiming one’s identity and asserting one's indigeneity in the present and …

Presidential Slaves: The Story Of Black People In The Lives Of Antebellum U.S. Presidents, Nika Davis

History Dissertations

The historical narrative about American slavery included many topics such as the African slave trade, the Middle Passage, slave culture, rebellions, religion, and abolition.  This study revealed more information to be examined in the record of American slavery relating to the presidents of the United States and their enslaved laborers.  This oversight proved prevalent during the years leading to the American Civil War from 1820-1860.  Therefore, this dissertation focused upon the enslaved and free Black people who intersected with the presidents and their friends, political acquaintances, and family.  By studying their lives, this dissertation revealed that the slaves associated with …

A Transnational Feast Of Our Lady Of Guadalupe: Globalization, Identity, And Collective Memory In Dodge City, Kansas, David A. Solis-Enriquez

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

This work examines the transnational connections of Dodge City’s Mexican immigrants and their celebration of the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe and how their cross-border activity were parts of larger systems like globalization, identity, and collective memory. With migration into Southwestern Kansas and the Oklahoma panhandle increasing intensely in the 1980s, because of the economic opportunities that the livestock and meat manufacturing industries offered, Dodge City’s Mexican population reached unprecedented heights. These migration waves mark the starting point of this thesis.

The incoming Mexican population flooded the city’s Catholic facilities, which prompted the community and the local diocese …

Models Of Emulation: Representations Of Foreign, Indigenous, And Accented Speech In Early American Literature, Elaina A. Frulla

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

“Models of Emulation: Representations of Foreign, Indigenous, and Accented Speech in Early American Literature” explores how American writers used depictions of “nonstandard” English and accented English language speech, traditionally described as “literary dialect,” as a way to negotiate identity, power, and political belonging in the formative years of nation building after the American Revolution. Beginning with Noah Webster’s mission to establish a standardized pronunciation of the English language that would simplify and purify spoken American-English and definitively differentiate it from what he saw as the corrupted, cosmopolitan British-English model, each of the three chapters examines literary representations of nonstandard emulated …

Pentecostals In The Ukrainian Ssr During Collectivization And The Holodomor Of 1930–1933: Socio-Adaptive Survival Practices, Oleksandr Korotaiev

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The article examines the social adaptation and survival practices of Pentecostal communities in the Ukrainian SSR under the conditions of forced collectivization, dekulakization, and the Holodomor of 1930–1933. Drawing on criminal-investigative case files of the GPU, top-secret Soviet security service documents, party and state decrees, and testimonies of contemporaries, the study reconstructs individual, family, and communal strategies employed by believers in response to systematic state violence. Particular attention is devoted to Pentecostal communities in the Odesa okrug, especially the village of Holma in the Balta district, where Soviet repressive policies manifested themselves through a combination of economic pressure, religious persecution, …

“An Extremely Dangerous Institution:” The Cultures And Controversy Of Public Social Dances In Montana, 1900-1930, Danielle Allison Brown

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper explores public social dances east of the Continental Divide in Montana from 1900 to 1930. Rural social dances in schoolhouses and urban dances in dance halls created two different dance cultures. The relaxed nature of rural dances preserved the traditional values of nineteenth-century social dances, which reinforced community and family ties. Urban dances reflected the modern fads of the roaring twenties and challenged traditional values with sexual suggestiveness. Progressive Era moral reformers concerned about the possibility that social dance promoted illicit sexuality participated in an anti-dance movement and pushed for regulations of social dances. The anti-dance movement in …