Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP)

From 2013 to 2023, I served as oral historian at the University of Iowa Labor Center, where I managed the Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP).

With over 1,500 interviews with workers stretching over half a century, ILHOP is one of the largest and longest-running, labor-focused oral history projects in the US.

During my time at ILHOP, I was part of a team that led digitization of approximately 1,100 analog audio recordings and transcripts. I was also lead interviewer for a new round of born-digital collecting focused on the period since 1970. Themes for these new interviews included the rise of the public-sector, deindustrialization, the stories of recent immigrants and refugees, and new forms of organizing.

I wrote several grants to support this work, including a major award from the National Endowment for the Humanities that funded new transcription, indexing, and development of the project’s website, ILHOP: Iowa History As Told By the Workers Who Made It.

(PHOTO: “FE-UE 109 workers, Quad Cities,” the State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City)