Can you envision yourself in our 19th cohort? The Columbia University Oral History Masters Program community is over 200 oral historians strong and growing! We're even offering two $10,000 Future Voices Fellowships to admitted students next year.
Please join us for an Oral History M.A. program open house on Monday, February 2, 2026 at 9:00 A.M.
Information session
Virtually meet OHMA students and alums
Presentation by OHMA Alum: Xiaoyan Li
Mini Oral History workshop by OHMA Director Amy Starecheski
OHMA is the first program of its kind: a one-year interdisciplinary Master of Arts degree training students in oral history method and theory. Our graduates work in museums, historical societies, advocacy organizations, media, the arts, education, human rights, and development. OHMA is also excellent preparation for doctoral work in fields like anthropology, history, journalism, and American studies or professional degrees in law, education, or social work.
Jointly run by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, one of the preeminent oral history centers in the world, and INCITE, a lively hub for interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences, OHMA connects students with the intellectual resources of a major research university and with the intimate society of a small cohort of talented students.
Xiaoyan Li, a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Kansas. Her OHMA thesis examined Kuomintang veterans in diaspora and challenged dominant narratives that erased their trauma and postwar struggles. Her doctoral research focuses on Chinese sent-down youth who fled to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution and later migrated to the United States under Cold War refugee policies. Using trauma-informed oral history, she explores how survivors reinvent identity and build a sense of belonging in diaspora through commemoration, storytelling, and community networks. Prior to her doctoral studies, Xiaoyan spent four years at the Cui Yongyuan Center for Oral History at the Communication University of China, where she conducted more than 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese intellectuals and engineers. She later initiated and led a major oral history project at YLYK, conducting an additional 50 interviews with multiple generations of English learners. Her work centers on memory, diaspora, trauma, and the enduring impact of state violence and displacement. She has served as Chair of the Oral History Association’s Emerging Crisis Oral History Funding Committee for the past three years.
At this open house, Xiaoyan will reflect on her decade-long engagement with silenced memory and taboo histories, beginning with her OHMA master’s thesis and continuing through her doctoral research. She will trace how her interpretive lens has evolved—from an initial focus on uncovering hidden histories and negotiating questions of credibility in oral history to a deeper engagement with the subjective dimensions of memory, which has allowed her to explore identity, belonging, homemaking, and the afterlives of trauma.
Xiaoyan will also share how her training at OHMA oriented her toward a more explicitly interdisciplinary approach, drawing from memory studies, trauma studies, diaspora studies, and feminist theory to interpret narrators’ accounts. She will discuss how frameworks of intersectionality—race, gender, class, ethnicity, and power—have become central to her analysis, reshaping how she understands the politics of memory and the transnational forces that shape what can be remembered, narrated, or silenced.
Xiaoyan Li conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Li, a survivor of the Great Exodus to Hong Kong, at his home in Los Angeles in June 2025.