Staff Fellow

Biography

Associate Director of the Rutgers Oral History Archives, Jeongeun "Jŏng-ŭn" Park (she/her) is a historian, a digital humanities specialist, and an educator. Jeongeun is a community builder who is excited to Engage Diverse Voices so that ROHA can tell a more complete Rutgers and New Jersey story. She looks forward to exploring how the personal, the local, and the state history connect to the national and the global history. She hopes to highlight the ordinary and the extraordinary stories of individuals enmeshed in history by increasing the accessibility of ROHA's digital archive, broadening the reach of its newsletters and podcasts, and expanding community outreach. Jeongeun is an avid reader of histories of the Cold War and modern Northeast Asia. She received her Master of Arts in History from Rutgers University-New Brunswick and her Bachelor of Arts in History from Stanford University.

Fellowship Project

Beyond the Dot: Life-Course Oral Histories and Political Identity in America pairs two complementary tools to deepen public understanding of American political identity. First, the project will develop a political orientation assessment such as the Pew Political Typology Quiz or the Political Compass that maps participants’ political position on two axes. ROHA’s existing pre-interview surveys already capture narrators’ and their families’ party orientations. Second, each participant will participate in a life-course oral history interview in which trained interviewers will document the narrator’s family background, formative experiences, relationships, and values. The project then seeks to develop a digital interface where each dot represents a real person. Clicking a dot opens that narrator’s life-course oral history. Inspired by the Washington Post’s “Can you guess for whom people will vote?” quiz, the interface prompts audiences to test their assumptions about who holds what views and why. These life stories challenge assumptions embedded in demographic categories and reveal the complexity behind political identity.  

For the 2026-2027 fellowship year, the “Beyond the Dot” project will recruit 30-50 narrators from the New Jersey community, representing a range of political orientations, backgrounds, and life experiences. Undergraduate and graduate student workers will assist the principal investigator in conducting interviews and developing rapport with communities across New Jersey. Interviews will be conducted, transcribed, and preserved at the Rutgers Oral History Archives. With proof-of-concept established, the “Beyond the Dot” project will scale to oral history institutions and political science research centers in Big Ten and/or flagship state universities.