Maria Bashshur Abunnasr is an independent scholar based in Beirut, Lebanon, specializing in the history of the modern Middle East with a particular focus on oral history. Her work includes a book project on the oral history of a rapidly changing Beirut neighborhood and the development of secondary-level educational materials using the Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) housed at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She currently serves as Co-Principal Investigator on a Spencer Foundation-funded oral history project, Disrupting Dispossession: Palestinian Teachers in Exile, documenting the experiences of former Palestinian teachers in Lebanon (1970-2000) and their roles as social and civic actors within their refugee communities in the face of statelessness, oppression, and war. She has also worked closely with the Lebanon-based German NGO Pro Peace to collaborate with various civil society organizations to develop and lead specialized oral history workshops, culminating in a bi-lingual online oral history designed to navigate contested histories, such as those related to the Lebanese Civil War, in post-conflict societies. Her publications include AUB and Ras Beirut in 150 Years of Photographs (2018) and We Are In This Together: The Ras Beirut Oral History Project (2025).
Fanny Julissa García is an oral historian, and a graduate of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University. She researches and teaches applied oral history methods with a focus on immigrant incarceration, family separation, and the transnational impact of failed border policies. She is the Director for “Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity”, an oral history project which documents the lived experiences of families separated by the United States government. She served for more than 15 years as a social justice advocate to combat the public health and socioeconomic impact of HIV/AIDS on low-income communities and worked closely with organizations fighting for the end of family detention and supporting survivors of sexual violence. She served on the editorial board of the Oral History Review until recently and will begin her three-year term as a member of the Oral History Association council in 2025. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2022–2023 OHA and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in oral history. She is currently the Editorial Program Manager at Voice of Witness.
Ngozika Anthonia Obi-Ani is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and International Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She is an interdisciplinary historian who explores the connection between women, memory, and conflict. Her exploration of memory and conflict studies gave her a deeper understanding of the socio-political dynamics that have shaped contemporary Nigeria. Her doctoral research was based on interviews with Igbo survivors of the Nigeria-Biafra War. She collaborates with the Conflict Continuities Collaboration Research Group at the African Studies Center, University of Leiden, the Netherlands, working on „A Question of Memory? The Biafran Struggle in Perspective". She is currently on a research fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, NIAS. My research focuses on how the transmitted memory of the Nigeria-Biafra war is presented on social media by those who didn't experience the war, aiming to challenge the official control of the past.
Natalia Otrishchenko is a sociologist and researcher at the Center for Urban History in Lviv. She has been involved in many international projects, including the “Region, Nation and Beyond” at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, “Memories of Vanished Populations” at Lund University, Sweden, “Historical Cultures in Transition” at Collegium Civitas, Warsaw, Poland, and “Legacies of Communism?” at ZZF, Potsdam, Germany. In 2022–2023, she conducted research as a Fulbright scholar at the Department of Sociology, Columbia University, USA. In 2023, she was a visiting professor at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. Since March 2022, she has been leading the Ukrainian team in the international documentation initiative “24.02.22, 5 am: Testimonies from the War”. She is the author and editor of the book Conversations with Those Who Ask about War (forthcoming 2024). Her academic interests include qualitative research methods, oral history, urban sociology, sociology of expertise, and spatial and social transformations after state socialism.
Gabriele Proglio is an Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. From 2014 to 2018, he was based at the European University Institute within the framework of the project “Bodies Across Borders: Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond”, headed by Luisa Passerini, where he conducted oral history research on postcolonial diasporas of Somali, Eritrean, and Ethiopian subjectivities to Europe, which was then published in the volume The Horn of Africa Diasporas in Italy. An Oral History (2020). From 2015 to 2017, he was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and an Assistant Professor of Modern History at the Université de Tunis “El Manar”. From 2017, he was based at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he conducted research on the mobilities and memories of migrant people across the Mediterranean, publishing the book Bucare il confine. Storie dalla frontiera di Ventimiglia (2015) as well as many articles. He also published a book on the Genoa G8 Summit protests, based on oral history interviews: I fatti di Genova: Una storia orale del G8 (2021). In 2021, he published I fatti di Genova. Una storia orale del G8 (The Genoa Events: An Oral History of the G8), a volume that collects the memories of the protesters at the counter-summit to the 2001 G8 in Genoa. His latest work, due out in October, is an oral and sensory history of Porta Palazzo, the largest open-air market in Europe, located in Turin. In this work, the methodological approach sought to decentralize the researcher's subjectivity by adopting Édouard Glissant's "right to opacity" for the creation of the source, and the methodology of "reflected memories" to interpret interviews gathered from eight women from the main diasporic communities in Turin.
Naoko Shimazu is a Professor at Tokyo College, International Institute of Advanced Study, University of Tokyo. Formerly, she was Research Cluster Leader of Inter-Asia Engagements at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College in 2016–2023. She is a global historian of Asia. Together with Gerard McCarthy and Yang Yang, she initiated the oral history project “Living with Covid-19 in Southeast Asia: Crisis, Control, and Community” which gathered data from ten ASEAN countries during 2020–2022 and created an archive of oral history and visual repository of over 100 interviews. Her current major project is on the cultural history of global diplomacy. Her major publications include Japan, Race and Equality: Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (1998), and Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (2009). She is co-editor of The Russian Revolution in Asia (2022), Cold War Asia: A Visual History of Global Diplomacy (2023), and the Oxford Handbook of the Cultural History of Global Diplomacy, c.1750––2000 (forthcoming 2024).
