Peter Bearman is the founding Director of Incite, the co-founding director of the Oral History Master of Arts program, and the Jonathan R. Cole Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. In 2019 he was named President of The American Assembly.

Bearman leads several Incite initiatives, including the Obama Presidency Oral History Project, REALM, Liberal Arts Education, and Understanding Autism projects. In addition to these projects, he is currently working on the analysis of large textual corpora, and linking cognitive social neuroscience to fundamental elements of human social structure, specifically, pair-bonding and balance in small groups.

A specialist in network analysis and historical sociology, Bearman has authored over 60 peer-reviewed research publications, in addition to three books: Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540-1640 (ASA Rose Monograph Series, Rutgers University Press, 1993), Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart, with Adam Reich (Columbia University Press, 2018). He has edited several others, including the Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Bearman is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. He was awarded the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2007 to investigate the increased prevalence of autism. With J. Richard Udry, he co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which was awarded the 2016 Golden Goose Prize. The recipient of numerous teaching awards, Bearman has chaired over 50 doctoral dissertations in sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1986-1998) and Columbia (1998 - Present).

Nyssa Chow is an oral historian, multidisciplinary artist, and writer.

She is Writer in Residence at Fordham University. She was Assistant Professor in the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) and Film and Media department at Skidmore College where she taught interdisciplinary documentary arts. She is a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at MIT Media Labs (Poetic Justice Group led by artist Ekene Ijeoma). She has served as core faculty at the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia University; as Visiting Scholar at The Humanities Council at Princeton University, and as a co-director of the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project at Columbia University (INCITE). Chow was Lead Artist Facilitator for the 2021 DocX Labs at The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, co-founded and conceived with documentarians Martine Granby and Stephanie Owens.

The nine-month DocX Fellowship was founded to support BIPOC emerging and mid-career artists build networks with like-minded practitioners across the spectrum of documentary arts, and to serve as a space where community, meaningful conversation, and deep engagement with art practice could be possible. She was the 2019-2021 Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts and has served as Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton University, as Visiting Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, and as Visiting Assistant Professor in the BFA Film Program at Purchase College. She was the 2018 Recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein for Literary Oral History won for the immersive literary oral history project ‘The Story of Her Skin’. This project also won the Columbia University Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award.

Chow has collaborated with filmmakers and artists, most recently with Jennifer Wen Ma on her exhibition An Inward Sea for the New Britain Museum of Art. Their current collaboration, an expansion of The Inward Sea: Oral History, earned fiscal sponsorship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). Chow has conducted oral histories on behalf of arts institutions such as the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and has lectured widely on the intersection of art and oral history; embodied knowledge and listening; and literary oral history. Her solo exhibition Still, Life., a series of installations using sound, light, and assemblage was held at Gallery One in Trinidad. Her most recent work Trace: A Memorial was exhibited in the group exhibition ‘How We Remember’ at the Miriam and Ira D Wallach Art Gallery in New York City.

Nyssa was born in Trinidad and is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Film program and Columbia University's Oral History Masters Program.

In addition to being the Director of the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research at Incite, Mary Marshall Clark is the co-founding director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) degree program (with Peter Bearman)  created in 2008-09, the first oral history master’s program in the United States. Mary Marshall has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991, and was president of the United States Oral History Association from 2001-2002. She was the co-principal investigator (with Peter Bearman) of The September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, a longitudinal oral history project through which over 1,000 hours of interviews were taken with eye-witnesses, immigrants and others who suffered in the aftermath of the events. She also directed related projects on the aftermath of September 11th in New York City.

Mary Marshall has directed projects on the Carnegie Corporation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Japanese Internment on the East Coast.  She founded the Guantanamo Rule of Law Oral History Project in 2009, through which over 350 hours of oral history were collected with advocacy and constitutional lawyers, lawmakers, judges, representatives from the department of state, former prisoners and psychologists who protested the American Psychological Association’s involvement in torture.

Mary Marshall was president of the national Oral History Association in 2001-2002, and participated in the founding of the International Oral History Association.  She has conducted life history interviews with lead figures in the media, human rights, African American history, South Africa history and recorded women’s achievements in journalism, politics and the arts. Mary Marshall directs Columbia University’s biannual Summer Institute in Oral History. She writes on issues of memory, the mass media, trauma, and ethics in oral history. Mary Marshall is an editor of After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 11, 2001 and the Years that Followed, published by The New Press in September, 2011. She is a co-author of the human rights publication Documenting and Interpreting Conflict through Oral History: A Working Guide, co-produced by Columbia University and TAARII, the American Institute for Research in Iraq. She is an editor of the Columbia University Press Oral History Series, announced in 2019. Currently, Mary Marshall is a co-principal investigator and interviewer on the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and is the director of the Human Rights Campaign Oral History Project, tracing the history of the Human Rights Campaign in advocating for the rights of LGBTQ people in the United States.

Rebecca Feldherr holds the position of Research Associate at Incite. In this capacity, her work principally involves research and interviewing for the Obama Scholars Global Leadership Study and the Obama Presidency Oral History Project, and coordination of the Assembling Voices Fellows Program and the Summer Institute: Oral History and Social Change. At Skidmore College ('20) she studied Sociology with an academic concentration in societal inequity and inequality in the context of race relations in the United States.

Her Bachelor's thesis was awarded the Periclean Scholars Award and inquired into the legacy of slavery and political ideology as predictors of White racial resentment towards African Americans. In previous years, Rebecca engaged in research and advocacy work focused on criminal justice and education reform during her time at the Center for Advancing Opportunity in Washington, D.C. and at Johns Hopkins University. In September, she will depart for the London School of Economics where she will pursue an MSc in International Development Studies.

Terrell Frazier was the lead interviewer on the Obama Presidency Oral History project from August 2019 to August 2022.

He conducted interviews with 70 people on issues ranging from justice and regulatory policy to civic participation. His research interests include social movements, social networks, race and ethnicity, sexualities, and health determinants. Frazier has been at the forefront of using oral history as a tool for community engagement and social change, previously serving as the Director of Education and Outreach at Columbia University’s Center for Oral History. He is an editor of Documenting and Interpreting Conflict through Oral History. Frazier has also led communications and research efforts at GLAAD, Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America, and Freedom to Marry.

He is completing his Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University, writing his dissertation on the network dynamics and strategic practices that structure the relationship between executive power and social movements—a critical nexus offering a new lens through which to examine American political development and the contemporary policymaking process.

Ryan Hagen is a Lecturer in the department of Sociology at Columbia University researching risk, anticipation, and social change. He is writing a book on institutional disaster risk management in New York City, and recently co-directed the New York Covid-19 Oral History, Memory, and Narrative Archive. His research interests sit at the intersection of organizations, cities, the environment, and the sociology of science, knowledge and technology.

Evan D. McCormick is a historian of the United States and the World. He joined INCITE in 2019 as an associate research scholar on the Obama Presidency Oral History project, for which he focuses on the Obama administration’s foreign policies and the Obama presidency in a global context. He also leads the Obama Scholars Global Leadership Study , a ten-year prospective oral history project based on interviews with the Obama Foundation Scholars at Columbia University. Evan’s academic work has focused on U.S. foreign policy and contested ideas of security, democracy, and rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His scholarly work has appeared in Diplomatic History and the Journal of Cold War Studies, and his commentary on foreign policy and presidential history has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica, War on the Rocks, and Clarín (Buenos Aires). Evan received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia (2015) and an M.A. in International Relations from Yale University (2007). He 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. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., Evan served as a policy fellow in the Department of Homeland Security (2007-2009). A musician and record collector, Evan spends too much time thinking about the relationship between music and its historical contexts. He hosts ‘Music In Time’ on WGXC in the Hudson River Valley, a monthly show that explores the social and political frames in which songs and albums emerge, are listened to, and reflected on over the years.

Alessandro Portelli has taught American Literature at the Universities of Siena and Rome from 1974 to 2012.

From 2004 to 2008 he served as Rome’s Mayor’s advisor on historical memory; in 2005-6 he was a member of Rome’s city council. He is the founder and chairman of the Circolo Gianni Bosio, an independent organization for the study and promotion of people’s cultures, folk music and oral history. He has served as visiting professor, research fellow and in other capacities at several universities worldwide, including Manchester, Aberdeen, Columbia, University of Kentucky, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. In 2013, he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of La Plata. His work published in English includes The Death of Luigi Trastulli and other Stories. Form and Meaning in Oral History (Suny Press, 1991), The Text and the Voice. Writing, Speaking and Democracy in American Literature (Columbia University Press, 1994), The Battle of Valle Giulia. Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Wisconsin University press, 1997), The Order has Been Carried Out. History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Palgrave, 2003, Oral History Association best book award; originally published as L’ordine è già stato eseguito. Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria, 1999, Viareggio Book Prize), I Can Almost See the Lights of Home (Journal of MultiMedia History, Oral History Association award for best non-print work in oral history), They Say in Harlan County: an Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2011; Weatherford Appalachian Book prize; It. translation, America profonda, 2012, Onofri Book Prize), Hard Rain: Bob Dylan, oral cultures, and the Meaning of History (Columbia University Press, 2022). His work has been translated in several languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Finnish, Portuguese (two collections of his essays have appeared in Brazil and in Portugal).

He has published in many academic journals intellectually and writes regularly for il manifesto daily in Rome, produces radio programs and has edited a number of records based on his field recordings of Italian folk music. His current project is a collection of music and life stories from immigrants to Italy from different parts of the world (We Are Not Going Back. Migrant Music of Resistance, Memory and Pride, 2016).

Sara Sinclair is an oral historian of Cree-Ojibwa, German-Jewish and British descent. Sara teaches in the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia University.

She is Project Director of the Aryeh Neier Oral History Project at Columbia Center for Oral History Research [CCOHR]. Sara is currently co-editing two anthologies of Indigenous letters, for Penguin/Random House Canada. She is the editor of How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America (2020, Voice of Witness/Haymarket Books). She has contributed to CCOHR’s Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive, Obama Presidency Oral   History, and Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project. With Peter Bearman and Mary Marshall Clark, Sinclair edited Robert Rauschenberg: An Oral History, published by Columbia University Press in spring 2019.

Prior to attending Columbia University's Oral History Masters or Arts, Sara lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where she conducted an oral history project for the International Labour Organization’s Regional Office for Africa. Sara’s current and previous clients include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the City of New York, New York City Department of Environmental Protection.

Liz Strong is an oral historian, and Project Manager for the Obama Presidency Oral History. Prior to joining Incite in 2019, she spent two years as Project Coordinator for the Muslims in Brooklyn Public History Project at the Center for Brooklyn History (formerly Brooklyn Historical Society). From 2015 to 2019, Liz was the Oral History Program Manager for the New York Preservation Archive Project (NYPAP), where she led several oral history initiatives on the history of the preservation movement in New York City.

She is co-chair of the Oral History Association’s (OHA) Advocacy Committee, and previously served on the OHA’s task force to author their 2018 Principles & Best Practices. As a freelance oral historian and personal historian, beginning in 2010, she worked with a variety of clients, including the Washington Department of Commerce in 2013, and the University of Arizona Steward Observatory in 2012. She received an MA in Oral History from Columbia in 2015, and a BA in Narrative Arts from Oberlin College in 2009.

Olusola Owonikoko is a development practitioner working with businesses and legislators to promote inclusive policies and programs to increase the hiring of people with disabilities in Nigeria.

Olusola is the Executive Director of Stanforte Edge, an organization that has provided training to 250 corporations to develop disability-inclusive policies, practices, and programs. To improve the developmental outcomes of people with disabilities and to remove barriers to employment, Stanforte Edge’s disability-focused digital skills program has trained 5,000 youth with disabilities in sought-after skills, connected 1,500 youth to job opportunities, and provided business support to 1,000 entrepreneurs with disabilities since 2014. Stanforte Edge’s advocacy, education and training programs are all co-created with the communities they serve. The organization has supported four people with disabilities in their run for public office, and the organization’s Disability Audit Toolkit, which was created using feedback and solutions from people with disabilities, is used by organizations across Nigeria. Olusola’s work with state-level policymakers contributed to the successful implementation of disability-inclusive public policies in four Nigerian states. Olusola was named one of the 100 Most Influential Young Leaders in Africa by the Pan-Africa Youth Leadership Foundation.

He is a member of The World Bank’s Skills for Employment Youth Advisory Group and he is the president of the Carrington Fellowship Network, a U.S. Government civic leadership program in Nigeria. Olusola holds a master’s degree in globalization, business and development from the University of Sussex and a bachelor’s degree in microbiology from the University of Ilorin.