Oral History Research Office

As part of our 2009 Summer Institute: Narrating the Body: Oral History, Narrative and Embodied Practice, the OHRO is pleased to announce two public lectures. Kathy Davis, author of The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves, will speak about the globalization of feminism and Alessandro Portelli, author of The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, will speak about his work creating a community history of Harlan County, Kentuckey. For more information on these exciting opportunities, including dates and locations, please click here.

2009 SUMMER INSTITUTE

Narrating the Body: Oral History, Narrative and Embodied Practice, June 1-12, 2009

The Columbia University Oral History Research Office is delighted to announce that the 2009 Annual Summer Institute, "Narrating the Body: Oral History, Narrative and Embodied Practice.” The Institute will explore issues, stories and performances tracing the history of the body, as well as oral history as an embodied practice. Two of OHRO’s former Rockefeller Humanities fellows, Kathy Davis of the Netherlands and Jose Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy of Brazil, will join the Institute to share their recent scholarship on the body. Kathy Davis will present on the oral history research that formed the basis for her award-winning book, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders, as well as her general research and scholarship on the operation of gender and power in health care, feminist activism around the body, and the globalization of women’s narratives. Jose Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy will present on current oral history research in Brazil on the use of the body as a form of self/family survival and space of cultural dialogue and commerce, as well as discourses around migration. Presentations, workshops and lectures will also be led by Alessandro Portelli, Mary Marshall Clark, Peter Bearman, Ronald J. Grele, Amy Starecheski, Rita Charon, Marsha Hurst, Linda Shopes, Steve Rowland, and Corie Trancho-Robie.

For more information on the 2009 Summer Institute, click here.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards Columbia Grant to Preserve Oral History Recordings

Columbia University Libraries will receive $371,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a two-year project to preserve 820 recordings containing almost 1200 hours of sound. The audiotapes are part of the Oral History Research Office’s collection of recorded interviews and memoirs, and have been selected because they are among the most important and the most threatened by imminent deterioration due to the inherent fragility of the media.

Read more...

AG Foundation Grant Funds Oral History of Women in the Visual Arts

Agnes Gund, one of New York’s most generous patrons of the arts, has given the Columbia University Oral History Research Office a grant to record an oral history of women in the visual arts. The project will be named “The Elizabeth Murray Oral History of Women in the Visual Arts” in honor of the recently deceased celebrated painter and printmaker.

Through the two-year project, the Oral History Research Office will conduct life and career histories of twenty women artists, collectors and curators whose contributions have impacted the art world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The interviews will be made available to the public through the Columbia University Libraries, as well as through deposit in museum and arts-based archives.

Read more...

Help support the work of our Office