Samuel Finesurrey received his Ph.D. in Cuban History with a specialization in Oral Histories from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2018. His historical research, displayed in select scholarship and Cuba’s Anglo-Americans in Times of Revolution digital archive on this site, explores how, in the context of revolution, contact between U.S. nationals and Cuba’s marginalized communities at once reproduced existing hierarchies and cultivated opportunities for intergroup solidarities. 

Beginning in the academic year 2018–2019 at Guttman, Finesurrey has collaborated with a wide range of community college students on designing, collecting and archiving oral histories from the people who helped clear their paths to college: ancestors, activists and community members. Together, in 2019, we established the Guttman Community College Undergraduate Scholars Oral History Project. The nearly 200 student-collected testimonies being prepared for Guttman Community College Undergraduate Scholars Oral History Project is being constructed by community college students, curating testimonies gathered by themselves and their peers. In Spring 2020 he received the ACLS/Mellon Community College Fellowship to continue digitizing this collection while also producing an anthology of student collected oral histories, which will be edited in collaboration with undergraduates. In 2019 Dr. Finesurrey became the Director of Oral Histories on “A History of the Present” grant, a five-year longitudinal inquiry of 90 Latinx middle–high schoolers navigating NYC schools. In March 2020, due to the pandemic, followed shortly by racial justice protests, they saw an opportunity to document the experiences of young people, surviving within intersecting historic crises. In addition to these NYC based projects, he has served as an advisor who participated, with a select group of Guttman students, in the Texas-based HBCU Truth & Reconciliation Oral History Project, led by Black Christian organizations and Historically Black Colleges, dedicated to gathering testimonies from communities struggling to contest historic and modern manifestations of white supremacy.