The Rutgers Oral History Archives is very excited to announce the 2025 Fall Chambers Oral History Fellowship Lecture, featuring Dr. Kiamsha Bynes (PhD’25, History) and Cherene Aniyan (History), on November 20, 2025 from noon to 2 PM at Academic Building, Room 6051. We warmly invite you to the event and ask that you circulate the event flyer widely.
2025 Fall Chambers Oral History Graduate Student Fellowship Lecture
"Using Oral History to Probe Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Black and Asian History"
Noon-2 PM, Thursday, November 20
Academic Building-West, Seminar Room 6051
The Chambers Oral History Graduate Student Fellowship 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. Kiamsha Bynes, PhD'25 in History, and Cherene Aniyan, PhD Student in History at Rutgers-New Brunswick will present on how they developed and used oral history collections to probe class, gender, and sexuality in African American history and Asian and Middle Eastern history.
Speaker Bios:
Kiamsha Bynes, PhD (Chambers Fellow, AY ’23-’24): Kiamsha Bynes is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University. Her research broadly examines the complex history of Black female athletes and sportswomen who helped shape Black women’s sporting culture across the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Her work moves beyond a focus on their athletic achievements by examining the social, economic, and political forces that shaped their experiences.
Cherene Aniyan (Chambers Fellow, AY ’25-’26): Cherene Aniyan is a History PhD student specializing in Asian and Middle Eastern studies. Her research follows the unravelling of the British empire in the Middle East in the latter half of the twentieth century. Using an oral history archive created to preserve the counterrevolutionary legacies of the British Empire in an arena of decolonization influenced by the heights of Bandung ideology, this project attempts to understand how the British empire was ‘taped back’ together by young soldiers drawn from the colonies.
The Chambers Oral History Graduate Student Fellowship Lecture is presented by the School of Arts and Sciences' Executive Dean's Office, Department of History, Rutgers Oral History Archives and its affiliate community organization, the Rutgers Living History Society.