Thursday, September 24, 2009

Silvia Salvatici, "Individual and Collective Identities in Post-War Kosovo: The Archives of Memory"

2009 Fellow, The Italian Academy, Columbia University; Universita di Teramo, Italy

Silvia Salvatici specializes in Modern history with particular emphases on individual and collective memories in post-war societies, women refugees in the 20th century, gender and human rights, and European displaced persons in the aftermath of WWII. She received a PhD in Historical Sciences from the International Post-graduate School of Social Sciences of San Marino University and a PhD in Family and Gender History from the University of Naples "L'Orientale." Dr. Salvatici is lecturer in modern history at the University of Teramo (Italy) where she teaches Women's and Gender History. Since 2008 she has been Honorary Research Fellow at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology of Birkbeck College. During her time at the Italian Academy she will be working on a new research project with the title "Professionals of Rehabilitation. UNRRA Officers in Postwar Europe". With this project she will investigate the gendered re/construction of relief work in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which represents an unwritten chapter in the history of the emergence of welfare, humanitarianism and internationalism during European reconstruction.

TOPIC: Individual and Collective Memory; Archives of Memory

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Thursday, October 1, 2009

Amy Starecheski, "Oral History in the Classroom and the Community: Reflections from an Educator and an Activist"

Amy Starecheski is a former educator and member of the Columbia University Research Office’s core interviewing staff, and is currently doctoral student in anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.  Prior to beginning that program, she was the Chief Interviewer and Director of Research for the 550 hour Atlantic Philanthropies Oral History Project at the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, and a lead interviewer on the September 11, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project, for which she interviewed Afghans, Muslims, Sikhs, activists, low-income people, and the unemployed. Amy is co-author of the Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide, and teaches a course at ColumbiaUniversityTeachers College on "Oral History as a Multidisciplinary Teaching Tool." She co-directs the Columbia University Oral History Research Office’s Summer Institute in Oral History, which attracts faculty and fellows from around the world.

TOPIC:  Activism, Oral History, Education

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Thursday, October 15, 2009

Helen Benedict, "The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq" (Book Talk)

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, was released from Beacon Press in April 2009. Benedict's play based on the book, The Lonely Soldier Monologues, was performed in New York City at The Theater for the New City in the spring of 2009, and will be performed again on September 24. 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 will testify on behalf of women she interviewed before Congress in the fall of 2009.

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 Conveys 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.

TOPIC:  Transformations of Oral Stories: From Private Accounts to Public Dialogues

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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Natasha Lightfoot, "A Transitional Sense of "Home": Twentieth -Century West Indian Immigration and
Institution Building in the Bronx"

Natasha Lightfoot, Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, specializes in emancipation, race, and labor studies within the fields of Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History. She is currently working on a project tracing grassroots resistance and identity formation among emancipated people in Antigua. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Gilder-Lerman Center award for the Study of Slavery, Abolition and Resistance.   Dr. Lightfoot graduated from Yale University in 1999, and earned her doctorate at New York University in 2007. She is a member of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, the Conference on Latin American History, the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians.  She has published on the history of the New York University 2005-6 workers' strike, Caribbean history and more. She has recently published on the significance of the Bronx African American History Project to natives of the Bronx, and to her own research.

TOPIC: Oral history fieldwork; community history; immigration history

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Thursday, November 5, 2009

Seth East Anziska, "Interpreting Conflict through Oral History: The Israeli-Palestinian Crisis"

Seth Anziska received his BA in History (cum laude, departmental honors) from Columbia University in 2006. His thesis, "Crystallization of a Conflict: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, 1976-1980 ," was awarded Columbia’s Chanler Historical Prize and Alan J. Willen Memorial Prize. He earned his M. Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St. Antony's College, Oxford in 2008, and returned to Columbia to pursue his Ph.D. in International and Global History. A Wexner Graduate Fellow in Jewish Studies, Seth focuses on the Arab-Israeli conflict, U.S. foreign relations, and modern Jewish history. During the summer of 2009, he was an NSEP Boren Fellow in Beirut, Lebanon, conducting pre-dissertation research on American intervention in the Middle East during the late Cold War.  He utilized an oral history collection on Ethnic Groups and Conflict to support his undergraduate thesis.

TOPIC:  Multiple Accounts and Conflict in Oral History, Oral History’s Uses for Historical Research

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Thursday, November 19, 2009

Peter Shawn Bearman, "Narrative Networks"

Peter Bearman is Director of 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).

TOPIC Analysis and Interpretation: Narrative Network Theory

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Thursday, December 3, 2009

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, "Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish History" (Book Talk)

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Co-Director of the Institute of Research on Women and Gender, at Columbia University. She is the author of Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, among other books. Leo Spitzer is Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College, and the author of many books, most recently Hotel Bolivia: A Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism.

Book Description by Publishers:

In modern-day Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, there is an invisible city. Known as Czernowitz, the "Vienna of the East" under the Habsburg empire, this vibrant Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after World War II-yet an idealized version lives on, suspended in the memories of its dispersed people and passed down to their children like a precious and haunted heirloom. In this original blend of history and communal memoir, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer chronicle the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory. They find evidence of a cosmopolitan culture of nostalgic lore—but also of oppression, shattered promises, and shadows of the Holocaust in Romania. Hirsch and Spitzer present the first historical account of Jewish Czernowitz in the English language and offer a profound analysis of memory's echo across generations.

TOPIC: Cultural Memory, Holocaust, Narratives of Trauma