Ask an Oral Historian: Literary Oral History
Did you know that oral history has a long life in popular literature, separate from its academic history?
Zora Neale Hurston collected Black folklore in the rural South. Gertrude Stein worked everyday speech into her prose. Studs Terkel built his career on tape-recorded interviews with working people. Nell Irvin Painter has used testimony to recover history the written record left out!
Great artists and writers have been using oral history as art and the art in oral history to create incredible literary works.
If you are curious to learn more, join the August session of Ask an Oral Historian on Thursday, August 27th at 3 pm EST for a conversation on Literary Oral History with invited speaker Cameron Vanderscoff, who has worked on several literary oral history projects, including a book composed from interviews he and contributing editor Lynn Lewis conducted with Jean Rice, advocate for the homeless in New York City and beyond.
We'll explore questions of art in oral history and oral history as art, and what this means for understanding and amplifying the social potential, eloquence, and power of this practice.
This event is online via zoom and will not be recorded.
Story and Archive: A Two-Day Oral History Workshop
Join us for a two-session workshop on oral history and archives on Friday, August 7th at 1 pm EST and/or Thursday, August 13th at 6 pm EST. This event is in-person at Prime Produce in NYC.
Every community has stories that deserve to be heard and preserved. This two-day workshop covers the full arc of an oral history project, from designing your blueprint to conducting trauma-informed interviews. Day one is foundations and project design. Day two is interviewing practice, question design, and working with difficult or sensitive material.
Hosted by Natalie Milbrodt, University Archivist for CUNY and founder of Queens Memory at Queens Public Library and Fanny García, an independent oral historian with a decade of experience running impactful human rights focused projects. No prior experience required!
This workshop will take place in-person at Prime Produce, 424 West 54th Street, New York, NY 10019. You have the option to register for only one day or both! $35 for one single session, or $55 for both!
BOOK TALK: Leave If You Can
Join Narratives in Practice on Thursday, August 20th at 5:30 pm EST for a conversation with Amelia Frank-Vitale about her book, Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds.
Amelia Frank-Vitale spent years in Honduras with people at various points of deportation, return, and migration. Leave If You Can is an ethnography of young Honduran men who keep moving despite being deported, often more than once. Frank-Vitale's argument is precise: deportation does not stop migration, it produces more of it. Join us for a generative conversation that centers the ethnographic methodologies behind this work and what they reveal about how stories of migration are gathered, held, and told. This is a free and in-person event in Downtown New York City. Location details will be shared after registration is complete.
