About Alissa Rae

Alissa Rae Funderburk is the Mellon Foundation Oral Historian for the Margaret Walker Center at HBCU Jackson State University. She maintains an oral history archive that is dedicated to the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of African American history and culture. Previously, she taught an oral history course for high schoolers at the Roger Lehecka Double Discovery Center and conducted freelance interviews for Jersey City. She holds both a bachelor's degree in anthropology and a master's degree in oral history from Columbia University. In graduate school, Alissa Rae served as Deputy Director of the Columbia Life Histories Project alongside its co-founder Benji de la Piedra and her thesis on the religious and spiritual experiences of Black men in New York City was a continuation of her undergraduate studies of race, culture, religion, and the African diaspora, as a John W. Kluge Scholar in the Columbia College class of 2012.

Alissa Rae is 1st Vice President for the Oral History Association and creator of the nonprofit, The Black Oral Historians Network, a virtual meeting ground for Black memory workers. She also serves as an interviewer for the NAACP LDF Oral History Project and consults on the HBCU LA Student Protest Archives Oral History Project. Her most recent project, Thee Black Pride in JXN, focused on recording the life histories of Black members of the LGBTQ community in Jackson, MS. In addition, her latest research centers on narrator compensation, reparations, and the transcription of Black voices.