I grew up the child of an engineer and computer scientist in the booming suburbs of Huntsville, Alabama, but I was always more interested in stories about my grandfathers—union members at US Steel in Birmingham—than in rockets or astronauts.

I conducted my first oral history interviews as a student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where I was taught by Andy Dunar, an editor of the Oral History Review, the premier journal of the oral history profession in the United States, and himself an oral historian of the workers who built the Hoover Dam.

In 1999, I left Alabama for the University of Iowa, where I studied labor and working-class history with Shelton Stromquist and joined my first union, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 896, also known as the Campaign to Organize Graduate students (COGS).

During my time at Iowa, I learned what it meant to be a union steward and to guide a local union as part of a coordinating committee (our version of an executive board). I was also fortunate to be a UE delegate to three international gatherings of union members from around the world to discuss the struggles of public-sector workers in Mexico, Canada, Japan, and the United States.

In 2007, I came home to Alabama to put my training to work as an editorial consultant with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI), a museum, archive, and community center dedicated to carrying on the work of Birmingham’s civil rights activists from the 1950s and 1960s. While at the BCRI, I worked with the director of the institute’s oral history project, Horace Huntley, to produce Foot Soldiers for Democracy, a volume of oral histories with veterans of the city’s desegregation campaign of 1963.

In 2013, I returned to Iowa as an oral historian at the University of Iowa Labor Center. Over the course of a decade, I crisscrossed Iowa and the US recording hundreds of interviews for the Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP), an almost fifty-year-old oral history collaboration founded by the Iowa labor movement.

During these years, I won a series of grants and other awards to support this work. They included an Archie Green Fellowship from the Library of Congress to collect interviews and photographs from recent immigrant and refugee meatpacking workers in the Midwest, and an over $190,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to transcribe and index new ILHOP interviews.

I also went back to school to develop my skills and credentials in archival work, photography, and audio production. This work included earning a Master of Arts in Library and Information Science from the University of Iowa, and coursework toward a certificate in Documentary Arts from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. I’ve used these skills to develop and produce a podcast focused on the stories of Midwestern workers, “Speaking of Work.”

In addition, since 2017, I have served as president of the Iowa Labor History Society. In this capacity, I have helped develop the organization’s successful fundraising and outreach capacities, including support for National History Day projects, production of materials for K-12 schools, and curation of an innovative traveling exhibit based on the ILHOP interviews.

In 2023, I left the Labor Center to pursue more direct advocacy work as a UniServ director with the Iowa State Education Association’s office in Ottumwa, Iowa. I also continue my scholarship, teaching, and creative work through the ExtraBoard and as an adjunct faculty member in the University of Iowa’s History Department and Center for Human Rights.

Thank you for your visit to my website, and I look forward to seeing how we can work together to tell your stories.

In Solidarity,
John

Member, ISU-NSO