2020 Election Candidate Bios

We are honored to present the nominees for this year's election cycle. Thank you to the nominees for volunteering their time to serve the Oral History Section. Please review the candidate's statements to get to know them better.

Ballots will be managed by SAA staff. Keep an eye on your inbox for when the ballot opens!

The candidates are listed in alphabetical order and by running position :

Christina Boyles for steering committee 

Christina Boyles is Assistant Professor of Culturally Engaged Digital Humanities at Michigan State University. Her research explores the relationship between surveillance, social justice, and archival practice. She is the co-founder of SurvDH, a community that explores the intersections between surveillance and the humanities. A selection of her published work appears in Digital Humanities Quarterly; Bodies of Information: Feminist Debates in the Digital Humanities; SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures; The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy; and American Quarterly. 

She is currently the director of the Andrew W. Mellon funded Puerto Rico Disaster Archive, a digital open access repository of Puerto Rican disaster response artifacts pertaining to Hurricane María (2017), the Guayanilla earthquakes (2020), and COVID19 (2020). In this project, she works closely with the Puerto Rican archiving and oral history community, including Ricia Chansky, the director of the Mi María project and the recipient of the 2020 Oral History Association’s Emerging Crisis Award; as well as Nadjah Ríos Villarini and Mirerza González Velez, the directors of the Caribbean Diaspora project. She looks forward to working with the Society of American Archivists, particularly by developing relationships between the organization, Puerto Rican archivists, and the digital humanities community.

Jessica Doss for steering committee 

I am interested in being nominated for the position of Steering Committee Member for the Oral History Section. I am currently a MLIS student with a concentration in archival management at Simmons University, and I am taking a class on it this fall. I have a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of North Georgia and I am a member of SAA. Also, I work at a for-profit archival company in Suwanee, Georgia, that conducts oral history interviews for our clients. I also volunteer as a member of the Oral History Committee at my local historical society which includes conducting interviews with locals of the area.

As an emerging archival professional, I am eager to network with other archivists. I also wish to become further involved in the oral history community as I have a great interest in the subject.

Larissa Krayer for steering committee

I am the Digital Archivist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s McGoogan Library since 2016.  Prior to that I worked for 10 years in the museum field involved with collection care, managing databases and digitizing large photo collections.  In 2019, I earned the Digital Archives Specialist certificate and am an active member of SAA.  I have recently begun working with a team in our library to conduct oral histories.  My role on the team is to help develop the processing workflows after the interviews are conducted, provide public access to completed interviews and manage the preservation of the digital files associated with them.   I have also had the opportunity to conduct informal interviews at our Alumni weekend for the past few years and have been working to gather more diverse stories from our alumni group.  

Being relatively new to conducting and processing oral histories, this section has been incredibly useful as we’ve moved forward with the projects particularly as we grapple with making older oral histories more accessible and dealing with the additional layer of HIPAA to our work.  I am very interested in serving on the Steering Committee to continue the conversations on issues involved with oral history archives.

Nick Pavlik for steering committee 

Nick Pavlik serves as the Curator of Manuscripts/Coordinator of Strategic Digital Partnerships at the Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University Libraries. He previously worked as an archivist at the 92nd Street Y and Brooklyn Historical Society in New York City, where in 2012 he also received his MLS degree at Queens College of the City University of New York. He served as chair of SAA’s Committee on Public Awareness for the 2019-2020 term.

“I am happy to submit my candidacy for membership on SAA’s Oral History Section (OHS) Steering Committee. As a project manager for two largescale oral history digitization projects at my institution over the past two years, oral history has become an increasingly important component of my work, and I have developed a deep appreciation for oral history as a means for archivists to establish fruitful relationships within their local communities and ensure that a diversity of stories – particularly those from historically underrepresented and underdocumented groups – become part of the archival record and accessible for future generations. I am currently working to help enhance my institution’s capacity as a regional center for oral history, and in so doing I have been eager to pursue opportunities to narrow my own knowledge and skills gaps and to engage with colleagues who have a shared interest in oral history in all its complexity and possibility. Last year, I served on the task force that developed the Oral History Association’s manual of best practices for archiving oral histories, an experience I found to be greatly educational and rewarding. If elected to the OHS Steering Committee, I will look forward to collaborating with colleagues to ensure that the interests and needs of oral history archivists continue to be represented and communicated within SAA, and that we maintain a productive environment for sharing information relating to oral history best practices, projects, and research. I thank you for your consideration!”

Katie Nash for vice chair

Katie Nash is the University Archivist and Head of UW Archives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has served in this position since April 2018. Prior to her arrival at UW-Madison she was the College Archivist at Williams College, and before that role she was the University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Elon University. Katie holds a Masters in Library and Information Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology from Appalachian State University. She became a Certified Archivist in 2011. 

At UW-Madison she is responsible for the overall management of the University Archives which includes supervising professional and student staff; spearheading the creation of policies, procedures, workflows; overseeing research and public service activities; participating in digital projects; leading space and environmental management of physical location; overseeing arrangement and description activities; stewarding donor relations and overall collection development; facilitating the Oral History and Records Management Programs; and driving outreach initiatives among a plethora of other responsibilities. Katie’s professional interests include arrangement and description, care and preservation of collections, accessibility (to collections and physical/online spaces), copyright and other issues related to rights and use, donor relations, teaching with primary sources, and overall management of an archival repository (to mention a few!).

Katie has been involved with various SAA Sections since the early-mid 2000s and continues to remain involved with local archival organizations. She currently reviews books and exhibits for the Oral History Review and works very closely with her colleague who heads the Oral History Program at UW-Madison. Her desire to be Vice Chair of the Oral History Steering Committee stems from a deep interest in collecting stories (personal and professional) and making them accessible. Oral histories are essential records of institutions and organizations and provide excellent complements to paper and digital records to help tell a more complete historical narrative. The professional networks that SAA provides is a valuable realm for archivists to be involved with, and ensuring various sizes and types of institutions are represented only makes the network stronger and more effective. She hopes to bring her experiences working for small private liberal arts institutions, as well as a large public university to the table to ensure diverse perspectives are represented.