Current staff bios
Paul Burnett is the Director of the Oral History Center. He joined OHC in 2013 from the Science and Technology Studies Programme at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada, where he was an Assistant Professor. Before that, he spent a year in Philadelphia researching and producing museum exhibits for the American Philosophical Society. He completed his Ph.D. at the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008, where he developed his research on the politics of expertise — how scientists and experts of all kinds establish their credibility, and how people choose between different kinds of expertise to try to solve complex social, political, scientific, and technical problems. He is currently writing a book on agricultural economics, neoliberalism, and development.
Roger Eardley-Pryor is an Academic Specialist who joined the Oral History Center in 2018. As a historian/interviewer at the OHC, he works on a variety of contemporary topics including science and technology, the environment, university history, civic activism, and intergenerational trauma. Eardley-Pryor earned his Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and his B.Phil. in Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University in Ohio. At UCSB, he became a National Science Foundation graduate fellow in the Center for Nanotechnology in Society. From 2015 to 2018, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Center for Oral History at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Eardley-Pryor's research, public engagement, and oral history interviews often explore ways that individuals and their institutions have examined, controlled, or cohered with nature at various scales, from the atomic to the planetary.
Shanna Farrell is an Interviewer/Academic Specialist and has been with the Oral History Center since 2013. She specializes in environmental history, food and beverage culture, arts and culture, and community and identity. She leads the OHC’s educational initiatives and serves on the Oral History Association’s council and the editorial review board for The Oral History Review. Farrell is the author of two books, A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits and Bay Area Cocktails: A History of Culture, Community and Craft, and produces the OHC's podcast, The Berkeley Remix. She holds an MA in Oral History from Columbia University and an Interdisciplinary MA from New York University.
Todd Holmes is a Historian and Academic Specialist with the Oral History Center. He received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University and was a historian with the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University before joining the OHC at Berkeley in 2016. A specialist in California and the American West, his work focuses on the history of politics, business, environmental regulation, and agriculture in the region. At the Oral History Center, his projects range from the founding generation of Chicana/o Studies and the history of the California Coastal Commission to the experience of West Coast Cannabis Growers. Holmes also serves as one of the lead historians for the California State Government Oral History Project, with featured interviewees such as Governors Jerry Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Elizabeth Semler is a medical and business Historian who joined the Oral History Center in October 2023. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota’s Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, where her academic work focused on the relationship between food and chronic diseases in the United States and the Nordic countries. Her dissertation interrogated the intersections of epidemiological research, American business interests, and the development of public health prevention policies in the 20th century. During her time at the University of Minnesota, Semler taught undergraduate and adult-education courses on medical and technological history. She also participated in numerous public-facing history projects, including museum exhibits, educational websites, and film documentaries. Taken together, this work has fed her passion for collecting, preserving, and making history accessible to broad audiences.
Nan Alamilla Boyd has a BA in history from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University, and she joined the Oral History Center as an Interviewer and Academic Specialist in August 2025. She has worked for many years as a researcher, writer, and professor, most recently as Professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University, where she taught courses in the history of gender and sexuality, oral history research methods, and urban studies. She has published reviews and articles in Journal of American History, Feminist Teacher, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Radical History Review, English Language Notes, Signs, Frontiers, Gender & Society, and Radical Philosophy Review. Her research interests range from the history of San Francisco’s LGBTQ communities to the impact of San Francisco’s tourism infrastructure on gentrification and neighborhood development. Her books include an oral-history inspired monograph, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (UC Press, 2003), and Bodies of Evidence: the Practice of Queer Oral History (Oxford, 2012), which pairs fourteen oral history excerpts alongside commentaries by oral historians.
Emilye Lewin is the Publications and Production Coordinator for the Oral History Center. She joined the OHC in 2025 from Notre Dame de Namur University, where she worked as the University Archivist, and previously Stanford University, where she was the Collections Care Coordinator within Library Preservation. She completed her master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020, focusing her research on digital preservation and archival research methods.
Retired staff members
Caroline Crawford is a part-time Interviewer with the OHC. A native Californian, she received a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of Geneva, and a keyboard degree from Royal Colleges of Musicians, London. From 1972 to 1981 she was the staff writer for the San Francisco Opera, managed the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players from 1981 to 1985, and that year joined the OHC staff as music Interviewer. Among the nearly 40 music projects she has carried out are a jazz/blues series of histories, including subjects Dave Brubeck, John Handy, and Norma Teagarden, and a series on contemporary American composers. Her blues documentary film entitled Jimmy Sings the Blues won the first jury prize at the Marin County Film Festival in 2005. Since 1975 she has written music reviews and published photographs in a number of newspapers and magazines, including Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Opera News.
David Dunham (retired) was the Operations Manager for the OHC and served as Website Director, Video Director, Project Manager, and Project Interviewer. From 2002-2024, David oversaw the OHC website, leading efforts to digitize seventy years of oral history transcripts; he also coordinated transcription, equipment, and audio/video production and editing. He was OHC’s primary liaison with the Library Systems Office, coordinating preservation, digitization, and online content. David managed the Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front Oral History Project in collaboration with the National Park Service. He participated in and contributed to numerous project-related community events, including talks on oral history methodology, recruiting narrators, programs sharing results of interviews, video presentations, tours, and exhibits. He is a documentary filmmaker and editor, film festival manager, teacher, and “Entotainment Guru” of the Bay Area.
Sally Smith Hughes (retired) is a Historian of Science and Academic Specialist, Emerita. Over her 30-plus year career at the OHC, she was project director and interviewer for several hundred oral histories in basic science, biotechnology, public health, and AIDS history. A major research interest is the complex process through which basic science is commercialized, as featured in interviews with scientists at UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, and with administrators and scientists at Genentech, Chiron, and Amgen. An interview series with early Bay Area venture capitalists extends the theme of commercializing science. She also conducted interviews on the response of the San Francisco medical and nursing professions to the early AIDS epidemic. With a University of London doctorate in the history of science and medicine, she published The Concept of the Virus: A History and Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech, as well as articles in Isis, The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and The Oral History Review, as well as numerous book reviews.
Ann Lage (retired) is an affiliate scholar and Academic Specialist, Emerita. She retired in 2011 as a research interviewer in the fields of natural resources and the environment; California political and social history; and the history of the University of California. She directed projects on the disability rights movement, the Department of History at Berkeley, the Berkeley Office of the President, the Sierra Club, and the Point Reyes National Seashore. Lage served as Associate Director of the Regional Oral History Office from 1994 to 2000 and acting director in 2000-2001. She holds a BA and MA in History from Berkeley.
Martin Meeker (retired) was with OHC from 2003, when he was a Social Science Research Council postdoctoral fellow, until his retirement in 2022. Between 2004 and 2012, Meeker served as an Interviewer/Historian with the center and conducted interviews in several areas, including the history of politics and public policy, health care delivery systems and medical research, and wine and foodways. Between 2012 and 2016, Meeker was Associate Director of the center and from 2016 to 2022 he served as the center’s fifth Director. After receiving his doctorate in U.S. history from the University of Southern California, Meeker taught at San Francisco State University and at UC Berkeley. He has published numerous reviews and encyclopedia articles and has essays published in Pacific Historical Review, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and Journal of Women’s History. Meeker’s books include The Oakland Army Base: An Oral History (2010) and Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s (2006).
Lisa Rubens (retired) is a Historian and Academic Specialist, Emerita. While at OHC, she worked on a wide range of projects including Women at UC Berkeley, social movements and community politics in the Bay Area [Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement; The Oakland Army Base; and Affordable Housing], and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her own research has centered on the interpretation and reception of mass culture and the role of women, labor and students in social movements and politics. Rubens taught for ten years at the community and state college levels before receiving her Ph.D. in U.S. history from UC Berkeley in 1997. Her dissertation on San Francisco’s 1939 World’s Fair is a cultural and political history of race and regionalism, currently under review for publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She has written monographs reviews as well as curriculum about labor and California women’s history, and served on the advisory board of the California Museum of History, Women and the Arts. Dr. Rubens created the Advanced Oral History Summer Institute for OHC in 2002, serving as director until 2009. Contact Lisa Rubens at lrubens@berkeley.edu.
Don Warrin (retired) is a Historian/Interviewer. He began work at OHC in 2002 and served as Associate Director from 2003 to 2005. He then continued as Historian for the next decade. His specialty was the Portuguese community of California. His Ph.D. in Portuguese was earned in 1975 from New York University. Subsequently he was a professor of Portuguese and Spanish at Cal State East Bay until his early retirement. Over the years his research and publications shifted from literature to history, leading to books such as Land As Far As the Eye Can See: Portuguese in the Old West and So Ends This Day: The Portuguese in American Whaling.