New additions to the Obama Presidency Oral History research and administrative team

After extensive searches, INCITE and the Columbia Center for Oral History are pleased to announce several additions to the research and administrative team for the Obama Presidency Oral History project. The project, expected to include up to 425 participants and over 1200 hours of video and audio recordings, aims to produce a comprehensive, enduring record of the decisions, actions, and impact of the Obama Administration.

Three exceptional presidential historians will join the current team of Peter Bearman, Mary Marshall Clark, Kimberly Springer, Michael Falco, William McAllister, and Terrell Frazier. Nicole Hemmer is a political historian specializing in media, conservatism, and the far-right. She has undertaken a wide-ranging set of projects, including her first book, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Penn Press, 2016). Dov Weinryb Grohsgal has taught in the Princeton University Department of History and served as an associate research scholar in the university’s School of International and Public Affairs. His research, scholarship and teaching focus at the intersection of presidential administrations, social movements, inequality, and race; his forthcoming book is “Bring Us Together”: The Politics and Policies of School Desegregation in the Nixon White House. Evan D. McCormick has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. His work focuses on Inter-American relations during the Reagan Years, and contested ideas of security, democracy, and rights in the Western Hemisphere. Evan’s first book, under contract from Cornell University Press, is entitled Beyond Revolution and Repression: U.S. Foreign Policy and Latin American Democracy, 1980-1989. 

Also joining as Project Coordinator will be Liz Strong, a graduate of our Oral History Master of Arts program. Liz co-authored Columbia’s guide for oral history transcription and audit-editing in 2018. She has served as an Oral History Program Manager for the New York Preservation Oral History Project (NYPAP) and as Project Coordinator for the Brooklyn Historical Society’s Muslims in Brooklyn Project.

Research and editorial efforts will be aided further by current INCITE staffers Tess McClure and Julius Wilson. Tess is a journalist and editor, previously the deputy editor for VICE New Zealand. She recently earned a Master’s in Journalism at Columbia University. Julius, who also serves as INCITE’s Program and Communications Coordinator, graduated from Columbia in 2018 with a major in Sociology and a minor in African-American Studies, writing his thesis on journalistic professional values in the Trump era.