The Huizinga Institute mourns the passing of our respected colleague professor Selma Leydesdorff (1949-2025). Selma was actively involved in the development of women’s history and women’s studies from the very beginning in the 1970s, yet it was oral history with which her name is most closely associated, also outside the academic field. Her intellectual, and activist engagement led to numerous publications, initiatives, and teaching. All of these consistently expressed a deep solidarity with those whose experiences are untold or unheard, especially related to traumatic histories, as well as a profound skepticism towards official accounts. In 1979, she co-founded the Vereniging voor Historische Mondelinge Documentatie (VMDH) / Association for Historical Oral Documentation, together with Jaap Talsma and others. In 2004, she was appointed professor of Oral History and Culture at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam, after a professorship in women’s history since 2002. From 2004 until her retirement in 2017, Selma was a staff member of the Huizinga Institute. In 2010, Selma started the National Working Group on Oral History, housed at the Huizinga Institute, with regular meetings in which oral historians discussed their work. Her renowned course “Oral History and Life Stories,” frequently co-taught with other experts, trained multiple generations of students and doctoral researchers in the methodology of creating and interpretating oral sources. Selma will be remembered for her deep personal and intellectual engagement, and her work will continue to resonate in and beyond the oral history field.