Troy Reeves likes to describe UW–Madison as a city unto itself. And as the university’s Distinguished Oral Historian, one of his jobs is to capture and preserve the stories of some of the citizens who live in this city.
That’s the primary reason why Reeves launched the Academic Staff Award Oral History Project ten years ago. Every year since, he’s reached out to request and record extended interviews with winners of the UW–Madison’s annual Academic Staff Excellence Awards, given to employees who exemplify sustained excellence, outstanding achievement, and creative initiative.
Over the course of a decade, the online collection has grown to 46 interviews, collected and accessible online for easy public access.
“To have stories from people who have, I’ll say, lived in the city, helps tell the story about it in a way that’s deeper, richer, and I would say, much more diverse,” says Reeves. “This project tells a story of academic staff and their time on campus. We try to augment the great pieces that get written about the winners by going into a bit more depth about their stories and memories of being.”
For Reeves, the work has become a labor of love, an opportunity to offer a window into the experiences of the individuals who often serve as the bricks and mortar of the university for which they work.
The collection dates to a discussion with Mary Anne Croft, the 2016 winner for the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and a Distinguished Researcher who joined the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences in the late 1970s. Croft talks to Reeves about how changes in technology (think: ultrasound) made her job easier, and how her department fought for years against the prospect of using e-mail.
Last year, Reeves interviewed Chuck Konsitzke, the Associate Director of the UW Biotechnology Center and 2025 winner of the Caroll and Robert Heideman Award for Excellence in Public Service. Konsitzke also happens to be the founder of the UW Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project, a group that works with the U.S. Department of Defense to track down and identify the remains of missing soldiers. That lesser-known fact adds a dimension of depth to his story for listeners who take the time to seek it.
“It was great to be able to spend a few minutes with him talking about not only the importance of the award, but the work that he has done,” notes Reeves.
Interviews with longtime academic staffers end up doubling as a sort of history of campus life. A discussion with Ron Kuka, the 2025 winner of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Leadership: Individual Unit Level and teaching faculty member in the Department of English—where Kuka’s been a part of the Creative Writing Program for three-plus decades—charts the development and expansion of the program he oversees. Like Konsitzke, Kuka also leverages his position and expertise to address community needs, embodying the enduring spirit of the Wisconsin Idea through the Wisconsin Prisoners Humanities Project, which works with inmates at correctional facilities to improve their literacy.
Each of the 46 oral history interviews are hyperlinked, allowing visitors to download the audio, and, in most cases, read a transcript of the conversation. Reeves credits his team of students for handling the often-thankless work of reviewing the AI-generated interview transcripts and preparing the files to be put online.
“The interviewing is the fun part—like, you get your dessert first,” he says, noting that the project receives no additional outside funding to make it more accessible. “But if you don’t process them, they’re going to sit in a digital version of a file cabinet or a bookshelf, and nobody’s going to know they exist. We have to process them and make them discoverable and accessible.”
The range of people who do find and access the academic staff interviews, as well as the other types of oral interviews and media (photos, documents, newsletters, etc.) Reeves and his staff compile in the archives, is sometimes startling. The list includes individuals from overseas, students working on history-related projects and, occasionally, relatives who have never heard the voice of their loved ones. For Reeves, it’s all evidence of how important this oral history project is.
“I tell people that we’ve been doing interviews on this campus since the early 70s, and some of those people, when they were interviewed, were talking about being on campus in the [1910s] and 1920s,” says Reeves. “We have over a century of oral history on this campus, which I think is really powerful, and I hope it gets people to think about the depth and the length of what not only the oral history collection, but the University Archives, can offer.”