This year-long course introduces students to important conversations within and about oral history through a series of curated public lectures. It meets for six events a semester, where students will meet with the speaker for an informal conversation about their career path and research process before participating in the public portion of the event.

This interdisciplinary course, taken in the fall semester, is an in-depth introduction to the theoretical writings in oral history on historical research, memory, interviewing methodologies, life history and the application of theoretical paradigms to specific fieldwork problems. Students will identify a field research project in the first three weeks of the semester and address the dynamics of the interview and fieldwork situation through theoretical analysis of the historic context in which the interview takes place. Students will also analyze the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing methods as they apply to existing disciplinary paradigms. The broader focus of the course is to introduce students to the wide array of theoretical issues raised by the intersection of history, memory and life story narratives in the effort to understand the recent past in relation to critical issues of interpretation in today's world.

This seminar is part one of a two-semester practicum in which students will learn and practice the skills required to conceptualize, conduct, analyze and disseminate oral history interviews. In the Fall semester, students learn project design, various genres of interviewing, audio recording, transcribing, indexing, and digital archiving. Students have the option of working on oral history projects conducted in partnership with New York City groups or working on their own projects. We weave together several strands of inquiry through the fall semester, some of which we follow into the spring:

nuts and bolts (audio recording, project design, transcribing, indexing)

interview strategies (peer interviews, balancing life history and a research focus, using research in an interview, working with embodiment in the interview, doing interviews in public)

power (legal and ethical issues, the interview relationship, oral history from an anti-oppression standpoint)

archiving (digital archiving, and this strand will carry over into the spring)

oral history and anthropology (comparative approaches to fieldwork, anthropological studies of oral history, and this strand will carry over into the spring)

This seminar is part two of a two-semester practicum in which students will learn and practice the skills required to conceptualize, conduct, analyze and curate oral history interviews. Attention will be focused on the curation and amplification of oral histories, including archiving, online presentation, museum exhibits, oral history documentary, advocacy, and teaching oral history. This work will emphasize interpretive processes, collaborative work, and how the public perceives and receives oral history. This course culminates in a public, multi-media, interactive pop-up exhibit created and curated by students.

To complete the M.A. degree, each student must produce a thesis project. Thesis students enroll in a spring seminar (G5012) to workshop their projects. Students writing theses have the option to submit their work for either May, October, or February graduation.

As a program, OHMA seeks to develop effective and innovative ways of communicating academic work to the public and encourage interdisciplinary scholarly work that is both creative and intellectually rigorous. In their culminating projects, students have the opportunity to produce a substantial piece of work that synthesizes their learning at OHMA and paves the way towards the next steps in their career. We support projects that use newly created and/or archived oral histories. Culminating projects may use oral histories as a raw material and/or take the oral history process itself as an object of study.

The thesis may incorporate a blend of publicly engaged and academic work, and may range from traditional scholarly writing to experimental creative production, but it must make a substantial and original contribution to the field and discipline of oral history. A thesis, which can be academic or creative in genre, is characterized by a sustained critical engagement with a body of scholarly literature in order to answer a defined research question.

This course provides an opportunity for Oral History MA Program students to engage in supervised internships for course credit. Students can plan an internship of approximately 100 hours of work for 2 credits, 150 hours of work for 3 credits, or 200 hours of work for 4 credits. The instructor will arrange some possible internship placements, but students are also free to make their own arrangements. Internships can relate to any element of oral history practice and research, including but not limited to project and program development, interviewing, interview processing, analysis and archiving, and creation of exhibits, documentaries, writing, walking tours, or websites using oral history. Internships must be substantive and have clear learning and professional development goals. More information is in the Internship Guide.

This is a course designed to give students a jump-start into learning the fundamentals of video and visual storytelling. Students will learn and apply basic knowledge of the cinematic language using camera, optics, sound, lighting and basic video editing techniques. No prior knowledge of video production or editing is assumed.

Students will have hands on learning experiences using camera controls and techniques and optics to accentuate psychological and atmospheric aspects surrounding the subject.  Additionally, through visual storytelling, composition and basic color theory students will understand how to incorporate theories of cinematic language to emphasize the mood and perception of the story. This course will cover basic lighting techniques for the interview in a hands-on practical experience that will strengthen participants’ camera, cinematography and storytelling skills. Students will complete the course by creating a final short video, having collaboratively conceptualized, filmed, interviewed and shot the necessary B-roll to structure a basic visual storytelling piece with the use of sound and basic editing.

Life histories and narratives don’t speak for themselves. To disclose what these have to offer, we have to analyze them. This can be true even if the teller or author of a story is making a point with her history or narrative. That is, this teller or that author is not the only interpreter of the narrative. And this is so whether it is about herself, about other people, about organizations, about movements, about whatever; whether it’s “real” or “imaginary;” whether the medium is words, images, sound, or whatever senses a “text” engages. Life histories and narratives—usually told as sequences of events, sometimes temporally sequential, maybe connected in the telling but maybe not—have to be analyzed to be understood. Put another way: How are you going to make sense of your interviews? We need to think about analytic methods to do so. This course focuses on what it means to deploy some such methods, the utility of doing so, and the importance of doing so self-consciously. Because we employ methods for substantive purposes, the course focuses on using methods for thinking about the relationship between individual lives and the social structures within which those lives are lived. That is, we learn how to develop and deploy C. Wright Mills’s “sociological imagination” through methods learned.

The course tries to achieve these ends by considering ways in which scholars and writers analyze life history and narrative information. It focuses on the utility and importance of different approaches to analyzing such information, and exposes students to the mechanics of analytic tools for carrying out such analyses. In particular, we introduce approaches used in formal social science, historical and anthropological analyses of qualitative information analysis and in not so formal social science analyses, e.g., novels! These methods/approaches can be used to reveal underlying dynamics that generate life histories and/or narratives and so deepen our understanding of specific people and their relationship to larger social and historical elements.

Oral history can be a powerful tool to document human rights abuses, just as it can contribute to conflict transformation processes and even the prevention of future violence. With its commitment to long-form, biographical interviewing and archival preservation, oral history is distinctive from, for example, the collection of testimony in a court of law or through a truth and reconciliation process. This course will consider topics that focus on oral history methodologies and how they might be used in conflict and post-conflict societies as a tool of conflict transformation, democracy promotion, or ‘dealing with the past.’ It is co-taught by the Institute for the Study of Human Rights.

Through weekly readings, seminar discussions, and independent research, students will be immersed in the discourse, theoretical approaches, methods, and applications of Indigenous oral traditions and oral histories. Students will learn about the nature of oral traditions from multiple Indigenous perspectives; studying them as deeply grounded knowledge systems and world views connected to places and nations. The course will examine how colonialism has acted a great interrupter to the collective memory which is foundational to Indigenous oral traditions and nationhood. Finally, we will consider how contemporary anti-colonial Indigenous narratives are ‘remembering back’ by drawing upon and building from the stories that have (and have not) been passed down through the generations.

In this course students will be introduced to the professional world of creative documentary. Students will learn about all aspects of documentary work from pitching ideas, to building and working within a team, to the craft and ethics of narrative storytelling. We will use the relationship between documenter and documentee, between collaborators, and with ourselves as a foundation from which to think about how these works are made -- how story and structure function -- as well as ethics -- the impact and responsibility of telling narrative stories. Students will be exposed to a number of documentaries in the mediums of film, audio, art installation, and literature. They will also complete a short documentary work of their own that engages with themes from the class.

In this workshop, OHMA students will deepen their exploration of core tensions in the practice of oral history through the creation of narrative art in a range of genres and forms, including writing and performance. We ask of each form: What lines are marked by conventions of genre, and how do those compare to lines drawn by the ethics of oral history? How can we draw on narrative and performance in our own creative and scholarly contributions to oral history?

Long-time colleagues and friends, Mary Marshall Clark and Ann Cvetkovich will model collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to oral history that draw on their overlapping and shared interests in oral testimony as a genre of public feeling, witness, testimony. They have both, for example, contributed to Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Oral History and Narrative and Memory project and the Covid-19 Oral History Narrative and Memory Archive project. Ann Cvetkovich, a professor of gender and sexuality studies with training in literature, brings to the mutual conversation interests in queer theory, trauma, affect, archives, and creative approaches to method, as well as experience with interviewing artists and HIV/AIDS activists. Mary Marshall, director of the Columbia Center for Oral History, brings 21 years of building oral history projects on everyday life, politics, trauma, activism and the arts. As a psychoanalyst in training, she also brings the lens of psychosocial analysis to questions of suffering, of social difference and intersectionality.

In addition to readings in theory and method, the course will focus on listening to oral histories with a sample interview for shared discussion each week. The final project for the class will provide students with an opportunity to work intensively with an interview of their choosing, and there will be brief creative exercises along the way that will allow students to workshop and share their process as listeners and visual observers to the world of memory and affect.