Past Oral History Events

Kathy Davis is senior researcher at the Institute of History and Culture at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She has published extensively on contemporary feminist approaches to the body, the beauty culture and cosmetic surgery, biography as methodology, intersectionality and transnational feminism. Her most recent book, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (2007) received prizes from the American Sociological Association Section Sex and Gender, the American Anthropological Association, and the American Historical Association. She is the editor of The European Journal of Women’s Studies (with Gail Lewis) and has held visiting chairs and research fellowships at Wellesley College, Columbia University, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University, as well as the Maria Jahoda Chair for International Women’s Studies at Bochum University in Germany.

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Alessandro Portelli, "Struggle and Survival: Narratives of the Body, Illness and Death in Harlan County, Kentuckey"

Wednesday, June 10 at 5:30pm in Room 754, Schermerhorn Extension

Alessandro Portelli is a professor of American Literature at the University of Rome. He is author of The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History; The Battle of Valle Guilia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue; and most recently The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, winner of the prestigious Viareggio prize in Italy. His essays on oral history and narrative have appeared in many journals throughout the world.

Spring 2009 Oral History Workshop Series

March 12, 2009: Dorinda Welle - "The Uses of Oral History in Documenting and Supporting Social Movements: Perspectives from Philanthropy"

Dorinda Welle is a Program Officer in Sexuality, Reproductive Health and Rights at the Ford Foundation. Her portfolio has two areas of focus: 1) promoting comprehensive sexuality education in schools through strategic cross-movement partnerships between sexuality education advocates and the education sector; and 2) supporting sexuality research and research training programs that directly inform public policy, sexual and reproductive rights, and public education.

Dorinda received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and her M.A. in medical anthropology from the New School for Social Research. Over the past 20 years, she has integrated oral history methods into ethnographic and public health research on homelessness, the prison system, drug abuse and drug recovery, and young people growing up in the AIDS epidemic in the US and China. Her work documents the confrontation between social systems that aim to fragment or erase the self through the institutional management of bodies and identities (Foucauldian biopower), and narrative practices that recover and reassert the self and sensuality as social and political forces (the "bio"power of lifestory narration).

She has served on scientific review committees (HIV/AIDS, community health, and small business grants) for the National Institutes of Health, and has published in numerous public health and social science journals.

April 2, 2009: Robert Smith and Mexican New York

Robert C. Smith is the author of the recently released, Mexican New York: Transnational Worlds of New Immigrants. He has also published many articles and book chapters on immigration and children of immigrants, education, transnational life, and Mexico. He is also a co-founder of the Mexican Educational Foundation of New York. Robert was a Rockefeller Fellow with the Oral History Research Office in 1999-2000 and worked with the OHRO and ISERP on the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project.

April 16, 2009: Jenelle Covino - "Oral History, Image, Exchange"

Jenelle Covino is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She works with found narratives, making alterations to photographs using printmaking and collage. She is working with Jacob Massaquoi on her current project, making photographs that respond to his oral history and feedback. She holds an MFA from Columbia University's Visual Arts program and a BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University, CT. Covino currently divides her time between teaching photography as an adjunct professor at Columbia University and pursuing her personal projects.

April 30, 2009: Helen Benedict - BOOK TALK, "The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq."

Helen Benedict is the author of five novels and five books of nonfiction. Her new nonfiction book, THE LONELY SOLDIER: THE PRIVATE WAR OF WOMEN SERVING IN IRAQ, will be out from Beacon Press in April 2009. Benedict's play based on the book, THE LONELY SOLDIER MONOLOGUES, is to be performed in New York City at The Theater for the New City from March 5-22, and at La MaMa on March 17. Her article on the subject, "The Private War of Women Soldiers" (Salon, March 2007) was awarded The James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism in 2008. For other articles on women soldiers, see Essays and links to left.

Benedict's newest novel, THE EDGE OF EDEN, set in Seychelles in 1960, is to be published by Soho Press in November, 2009. Her other novels are THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE, THE SAILOR'S WIFE, BAD ANGEL and A WORLD LIKE THIS. Her nonfiction includes VIRGIN OR VAMP: HOW THE PRESS COVERS SEX CRIMES, PORTRAITS IN PRINT and RECOVERY: HOW TO SURVIVE SEXUAL ASSAULT.

Helen Benedict's articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Salon, Ms., In These Times, The Women's Review of Books, The Nation and elsewhere. She is a professor of journalism at Columbia University.

May 7, 2009: Peter Bearman - "Narrative Networks"

Peter Bearman is Director the Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, the Cole Professor of Social Science, and Co-Director of the Health & Society Scholars Program. He was the founding director of ISERP, serving from the Institute's launch in 2000 until 2008. A recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2007, Bearman is currently investigating the social determinants of the autism epidemic. Current projects also include an ethnographic study of the funeral industry and, with support from the American Legacy Foundation, an investigation of the social and economic consequences of tobacco control policy.

A specialist in network analysis, he co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and has used the data extensively for research on topics including adolescent sexual networks, networks of disease transmission, and genetic influences on same-sex preference. He has also conducted research in historical sociology, including Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540-1640 (Rutgers, 1993). He is the author of Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005).