STAFF
Mary Marshall Clark
Director
mmc17@columbia.edu
212-854-2273
Corie Trancho-Robie
Assistant Director
clt2110@columbia.edu
212-854-4012
Jenny Dalberth
Office Administrator
jd2411@columbia.edu
212-854-7083
Professional Activities
The Oral History Research Office has been consistently involved in a number of efforts to raise the standards for the field. The Office was selected by the Rockefeller Foundation as a site for its Humanities Fellowship Program from 1997-1999, which sponsored the research of eight international scholars using oral history in interdisciplinary contexts. Both Ronald J. Grele, director emeritus, and Mary Marshall Clark, director, were involved in the founding of the International Oral History Association. The first international oral history conference that included participants from major continents other than the United States and Europe was sponsored by the Oral History Research Office in 1994, attracting 400 presenters from sixty countries. Until 1985, OHRO was the editorial office of the International Journal of Oral History.
All four directors of the Oral History Research Office have been presidents of the national Oral History Association, and participating in regional and local groups supporting the work of oral history. For many years, the Office was both headquarters for the Oral History Association and the editorial office for its various publications.
Once considered an interesting but tangential method of historical documentation, oral history has become one of the basic tools of the historian. Almost every issue of the major journals of the field of history, and increasingly, literature, carries reviews of works which have used oral history interviews. Additionally, the methodological and theoretical literature in oral history has become increasingly sophisticated and complex.
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