Summer Institute on Oral History 2008
Faculty Profiles

Gerry Albarelli has a Master's degree in Creative Writing from Brown University. He is an oral historian who has done extensive work on the history of the theater, education and September 11, 2001. He is the author of Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva, which chronicles his experiences during the five years he taught ESL to Yiddish speaking students at a Brooklyn yeshiva school. He has taught video production and writing at Harvey Milk High School and currently teaches oral history at Eugene Lang College and Sarah Lawrence College.

Peter Bearman is Director of Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) and the Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, the Cole Professor of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Health & Society Scholars Program at Columbia University. He is the author of Doormen, published in 2005 by the University of Chicago Press. With Mary Marshall Clark, he was co-principal investigator of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project. He is co-founder, with Clark, of the new Master of Arts in Oral History at Columbia, to begin in the fall of 2008.

Louis Bickford is the Director of Networks and Capacity Building Unit for the International Center for Transitional Justice. He has consulted with governments, NGOs, human rights activists, and democratic movements on strategies for confronting the legacies of past abuse in more than a dozen countries. Previously, he was the associate director of the Global Studies Program and a lecturer in International Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Bickford has worked as a consultant for the Ford Foundation in Chile and was a visiting researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences. He earned a PhD at McGill University (1997) and an MA at the New School for Social Research (1993), both in political science. He is currently adjunct professor at the Wagner School of New York University and in the graduate department of political science at Brooklyn College. Dr. Bickford has published widely on human rights topics and has a special research interest in memory and memorials.

Mary Marshall Clark is the director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University. Formerly, she was an oral historian and filmmaker at the New York Times. She was president of the Oral History Association in 2002. Ms. Clark lectures widely on the uses and theories of oral history. She is the founder, with Peter Bearman, of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, and co-directs the Master of Arts in Oral History. Clark writes on issues of memory, trauma and ethics in oral history.

John Grele is in private practice in San Francisco, California. He specializes in the representation of death row inmates in their post-conviction federal habeas litigation. He is co-counsel in Morales v. Tilton, litigation challenging California’s lethal injection procedures. He was formerly a staff attorney at the California Appellate Project in San Francisco, California, and a public defender in New Jersey.

Ronald J. Grele is the former director of the Oral History Research Office. He is author of Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History as well as numerous articles on the theory and method of oral history. Dr. Grele is past president of the Oral History Association, and was a founding member of the Executive Council of the International Association of Oral History. He writes and and lectures widely on oral history and the nature of historical consciousness.

Scharlette Holdman is the executive director of San Francisco's Center for Capital Assistance. Dr. Holdman pioneered the exploration of mitigating circumstances in capital cases, and for over thirty years she has helped legal teams discover, understand, and develop a wide range of mitigating information about their clients' lives, including brain damage, mental illness, the impact of racism and poverty on a child's development, and a host of other circumstances that together provide resources not to execute. She conducts multi-generational oral histories as a part of her legal advocacy.

Gara LaMarche is President and CEO of the Atlantic Philanthropies. Before joining the Atlantic Philanthropies in April, 2007, Gara LaMarche was vice president and director of U.S. Programs for the Open Society Institute. Prior to joining OSI in 1996, LaMarche served as associate director of Human Rights Watch and was director of its Free Expression Project (1990-1996) and the Freedom-To-Write Program of the PEN American Center (1988-1990). From 1976 to 1988, he served in a variety of positions with the American Civil Liberties Union, including associate director of its New York branch (1979-1984) and executive director of the Texas Civil Liberties Union (1984-1988). In 1988-1989, he was a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York. He is a graduate of Columbia University.

Peter Maguire writes opinion pieces for New York Newsday and is one of America's leading authorities on the Nuremberg trials and the laws of war. His book, Facing Death in Cambodia, features interviews with victims and perpetrators, NGO officials, and others. He has taught the law and theory of war at Bard College and Columbia University and has served as an expert war crimes commentator for television and radio. He received his doctorate in history from Columbia University in 1994. His first book, Law and War: An American Story, was published in 2001.

Manning Marable, professor (joint with Political Science and SIPA at Columbia University), has served since 2002 as the director of the Center for Contemporary Black History. Dr. Marable earned his A.B. from Earlham College (1971), M.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1972), and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland (1976). He has authored and edited 25 books, including Race, Reform and Rebellion 3rd Rev. Ed. (2007), Living Black History (2006), Freedom On My Mind: The Columbia Reader of African-American History (2003), Great Wells of Democracy (2002), Dispatches from the Ebony Tower (2002), Black Leadership (1998), and Beyond Black and White (1995). He has written over 275 articles for academic journals, edited volumes, and anthologies. His current projects include a major reinterpretation of the life of Malcolm X, to be published in 2010 with Viking Press, and the Ford Foundation-supported “Amistad Project,” a multimedia resource project at Columbia designed to enhance the teaching of African American history in public schools.

Roxsana Patel has a professional background as a Chartered Clinical Psychologist with the British Psychological Society and has specialized in research and clinical intervention with survivors of political conflict and refugees, as well as youth in post-crisis contexts. She read for a PhD.D. at the University of Cambridge and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University and a British Chevening Scholar at the University of London. As part of her post-doctoral research, Dr. Patel is currently analyzing empirical material on the collective memories and narratives of trauma of former political activists in post-conflict South Africa. She has worked for UNICEF in their Program Division on youth and post-crisis transitional issues. She has also written large research grants for various UN agencies and NGOs. She is the Senior Project Manager for two international foundations and is working on a oral history of the development of public interest law in South Africa.

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.

Michael Ratner is President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit legal organization dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Over the last four decades CCR has lent its expertise and support to virtually every popular movement for social and racial justice. Since 9/11 CCR has spear-headed the struggle to restore the fundamental right of habeas corpus and continues to combat the illegal expansion of executive power and the American torture programs that have undermined fundamental rights in the name of the so-called "war on terror," by representing victims of torture, rendition and domestic spying. Michael Ratner was co-counsel in representing Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United States Supreme Court in 2004. His leadership in the arena of human rights continues to strengthen the role of the international rule of law to promote justice and oppose armed aggression. He is the author of many books and articles, including Against War with Iraq and Guantanamo: What the World Should Know and the textbook, International Human Rights Litigation in U. S. Courts. He has taught law at Yale Law School and Columbia University Law School. Ratner is also the co-host of the popular radio program "Law and Disorder." The recipient of many honors, he was also included in The National Law Journal's list of "100 of the Most Influential Lawyers in America."

Steve Rowland is a Peabody Award winning radio documentary producer/director. He is president and founder of CultureWorks, Ltd. a non-profit documentary production company. He has been working in radio for twenty-five years, using music as a window to explore issues in American History, society, race relations, human creativity, spirituality, aesthetic beauty, the nature of "change" and human possibility. 

Linda Shopes is coeditor of Palgrave's Studies in Oral History and was formerly a historian at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. She has worked on, consulted for, and written about oral and public history projects for over two decades. Dr. Shopes is co-editor of The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History and, most recently, an on-line essay, Making Sense of Oral History, on the History Matters website. She is a past president of the Oral History Association.

Amy Starecheski is an interviewer and educator for the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University. She was a lead interviewer on the September 11, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project and was part of the team that designed and implemented the Telling Lives Project, exploring the uses of oral history beyond the archive, and the Response and Recovery Project, interviewing professionals who responded to the crisis of 9/11. She is currently the Lead Interviewer and Director of Research for the Atlantic Philanthropies Oral History Project. Ms. Starecheski is a co-author of the Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide and is an Adjunct Professor in Social Studies at Columbia University Teachers College.

Winona Wheeler (Cree/Assiniboine/Saulteaux/Irish/English with a dab of Scot) is a member of the Fisher River Cree First Nation, Manitoba. She has taught Indigenous Studies since 1988 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge and Research at Athabasca University. Dr. Wheeler has served as an expert witness on First Nation oral histories in the Federal Court of Canada and is currently the Research Strategist for the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba (TRCM) and Lead Researcher on the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs and TRCM Manitoba Treaties Oral History Research Project.