Chambers Fellows
The Chambers Oral History Graduate Student Fellowship is given annually to a Rutgers-New Brunswick History Department graduate student who utilizes oral history in their work in some manner and/or works closely with the Rutgers Oral History Archives staff. This gift is a reflection of The Cobb Foundation and The Ware Foundation's desire to honor the scholarly and scholastic legacy of Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History John Whiteclay Chambers II. Click here for more information on the fellowship.
The Chambers Oral History Graduate Student Fellowship Lecture is presented by the SAS Executive Dean's Office, Department of History, Rutgers Oral History Archives and its affiliate alumni organization, the Rutgers Living History Society.
AY '25-'26 Chambers Fellows
A.J. Boyd
A.J. Boyd is a fifth-year doctoral student studying 20th-century African American history with an interest in the history of race, gender, and war. Her research focuses on Black female soldiers in the World War II Women’s Army Corps. Specifically, she examines how Black women officers used the culture and hierarchy of the military to their own advantage, while also managing intracommunal tensions over respectability and racial liberalism. In her research, AJ compares interviews from the immediate post-war period and oral histories from the late twentieth century to mediate gaps between history and memory. She considers how the intention of an interview—for a published study or for a collections project— might influence what and how subjects share their memories. A.J. earned her B.A. from Indiana University Bloomington in History and African American & African Diaspora Studies.
Cherene Aniyan
Cherene Aniyan is a History PhD student specializing in Asian and Middle Eastern studies. She received her combined BA/MA in Development Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Her research follows the unravelling of the British empire in the Middle East in the latter half of the twentieth century. From South Asian workers who travelled on British steamships in the Arabian Sea and Arab masses who listened to Radio Cairo to the anticolonial solidarity groups which organized around the Dhofar Rebellion; she is interested in how this fraught decolonization was seen, heard and felt by people caught in the crosshairs of the disintegrating empire.
AY '24-'25 Chambers Fellows
Raven Manygoats
Raven is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in United States History and Gender and Women's History. She received her B.A. in History from Otterbein University in 2019. Her dissertation, “The Birthright of Generations Unborn: Native American Women’s Quests for Sovereignty in the Era of Red Power,” aims to be a comprehensive history that considers women’s place within the many facets of the Red Power Movement and contends that women sustained the movement from 1968 to 1996. Her work draws upon the experiences of both urban and rural Native American women and their participation in organizations like Indians of All Tribes, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Women of All Red Nations, and efforts surrounding environmental activism following the demise of AIM in the mid-1970s.
Sarah Coffman
Sarah Coffman is a fourth-year history PhD student focusing on twentieth century African American and urban history. She received her BA in History and African American studies from Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois in 2021. Her research, centered in late-nineteenth and twentieth century Philadelphia, examines how Black people across property ownership categories—homeowners, renters, housing-insecure, and unhoused—navigated the violent constraints of urban real estate markets on a daily basis. Within these stories, she is thematically interested in the maintenance and persistence of segregation, racial capitalism in real estate, how gender impacts Black shelter seeking, and public health and environmental illness.
AY '23-'24 Chambers Fellows
Kiamsha Bynes
Far too often society has dismissed and ignored the lives of Black women in sport. The ways in which notions of race, gender, class and politics molded their experiences exemplifies how sport has historically been an unlevel playing field for Black women athletes. Throughout history Black sportswomen were once prohibited from competition, barred by discrimination, and often snubbed by media outlets that only featured the success of their Black male and white female counterparts. Their stories which we know of have often been distorted in a way that undermines not only their athletic achievements but also the many ways they were influential to the social, political, and cultural development of athletic institutions. Using archival research, memoirs, and oral histories together, my project seeks to construct a narrative history that interrogates new ways of exploring the social and political lives of Black sportswomen. Through the Chambers Fellowship, I was afforded the opportunity to conduct six interviews with former Black coaches and athletes who played a significant role in the advancement of Black women in sports in the post-Title IX era.
Kiamsha Bynes is a sixth-year doctoral candidate focusing on 20th century African American and U.S. History. She received her B.A. in History from Bloomfield College. Her dissertation examines the centrality of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the lives and experiences of Black female sportswomen, whose contributions and activism in their quest for equality through the participation in sports help demonstrate a new perspective on challenges Black athletes faced.
Daniela Valdes
Daniela Valdes researches the history of gender diverse people of color in the twentieth century United States. Based on extensive research in the archives of criminalization of New York City and oral histories with trans and gender nonconforming people of color, Valdes’s dissertation offers a grassroots social history of working-class Black and Brown gender diverse New Yorkers from the Great Migrations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans at midcentury to the early twenty-first century. Her dissertation is a working-class history that broaches forms of survival and resistance, including participation in the informal economy. Additionally, she examines the under-researched historical connections between the carceral state and psychiatry showing how the era of mass public order policing underwrote the mass criminalization and pathologization of racialized, queered, and disabled people that continues to this day.
Daniela is a gender nonconforming Latino scholar and author of "In the Shadow of the Health-Care City: Historicizing Trans Latinx Immigrant Experiences during the Coronavirus Pandemic" which won the Antonia Castañeda Prize for best article on women’s Latina and Indigenous history from the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies. Previously, they worked with the Latino New Jersey Oral History Project conducting interviews with Latino/a/e/xs from New Jersey, some of which are featured in the Rutgers Oral History Archive.
AY '22-'23 Chambers Fellows
Laura De Moya-Guerra
"Chinese in Colombia: One Community, Divergent Voices"
Laura De Moya-Guerra is a PhD candidate in History at Rutgers University, with a research focus on migration, diasporas, and mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her presentation, "Chinese in Colombia: One Community, Divergent Voices," explores the varied experiences and intra-community dynamics among different generations of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in Colombia. Her work uses oral history methods to highlight voices often absent from traditional historical narratives, allowing for a deeper understanding of how gender and class shape interactions within the diaspora. The interviews she conducted provide a nuanced portrayal of the complexity and diversity within Colombia’s Chinese community.
Yulia Cherniavskaia
"Knowledge is Happiness": Popularizing Science in the USSR and the Late-Soviet Ideal of a Well-Rounded Person
Cherniavskaia is a d
octoral student in the Department of History specializing in modern European, women's and gender and global and comparative history. Her dissertation explores the popularization of science and humanistic knowledge in the postwar USSR. It focuses on the Soviet Society for the Dissemination of Knowledge (Znanie), a mass-education institution that propagated new knowledge to Soviet citizens through public lectures and popular science brochures. Her project examines how Soviet ideologists and Znanie activists conceived of popularly-available science as means to mold all Soviet citizens into modern, educated subjects--seen as a key prerequisite for a future communist society. She uses oral history to explore how Soviet actors, who popularized and disseminated new knowledge, make sense of Soviet ideals of personhood, knowledge and humanism today. What often motivated Znanie activists was a belief in the liberating and progressive nature of science and its ability to transform people and societies. Tracing the impact of these activities, her work situates popular education as central to Soviet subjectivity and its lived experience after the Second World War.
AY '21-'22 Chambers Fellow
Anna Richey
"Fighting Back: How Anti-Rape Activists Fostered Feminism on Campus"
On April 13, 2022, Anna Richey presented the fourth annual John W. Chambers II Oral History Graduate Fellowship lecture. Her virtual talk, entitled "Fighting Back: How Anti-Rape Activists Fostered Feminism on Campus," focuses on anti-rape activism at Columbia University, Barnard College and Ohio State University. In the lecture, Richey examines the changing definition of rape and sexual violence over time, the relationship between sexual violence, race, gender and space, and the interaction between anti-rape activists and their institutions of higher education.
More broadly, in her dissertation, Richey is exploring how women students organized to prevent sexual violence on college campuses from 1950 to 1990 and effected university programming involving Title IX and gender equality. Richey's analysis draws from archival interviews, as well as oral history interviews that she conducted of activists. Oral histories play a central role in Richey's research by centering the voices of survivors and activists, as they redefined public discourse on gendered violence. She contends, "Oral histories have been the most instrumental source material for my research." Because university archives often exclude sexual violence from records in order to preserve their legacies, Richey says, "The voices of participants provide information that would otherwise be unattainable."
Richey earned a Masters in Women's History from Rutgers University and a Bachelor of Arts from Ohio State University in History and Women's Studies.