Summer Institute on Oral History 2009
Faculty Profiles

Complete List Coming Soon!

Rita Charon is Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. A general internist with a primary care practice in Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Charon directs the Narrative Medicine curriculum and teaches literature, narrative ethics, and life-telling, both in the medical center and Columbia's Department of English. She is currently Principal Investigator on an NIH project to enhance the teaching of social science and behavioral science in medical schools and has received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residence and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness and co-editor of Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine and Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics.

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.

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.

Lynn Garafola is Professor of Dance at Barnard College. She is a dance historian and critic whose articles have been published in Dance Magazine, The Nation, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is also the former editor of the book series "Studies in Dance History." Professor Garafola served as guest curator of the exhibition "Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet" at the New-York Historical Society. Her other exhibitions have included "500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection" (with Patrizia Veroli) and "New York Story: Jerome Robbins and his World," both at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Currently, she is working on a new exhibition, "Diaghilev's Theater of Marvels:  The Ballets Russes and Its Aftermath," which will take place at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in June 2009. She is a former Getty Scholar, recipient of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and National Endowment for the Humanties, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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 lectures widely on oral history and the nature of historical consciousness.

Marsha Hurst is on the faculty of Columbia's Narrative Medicine Program and is a research scholar at Columbia University's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, where she is coordinating a faculty seminar on Narrative Genetics. She is also a consultant on health advocacy programs, issues, and education with particular interest in women's health and aging. From 1998 through 2007, Hurst was the director of the graduate program in health advocacy at Sarah Lawrence. Hurst co-edited, with Sayantani DasGupta, Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, an anthology of women's illness narratives (2007). She is also co-founder and vice president of the Westchester End-of-Life Coalition and a member of the New York State Palliative Care Education and Training Council.

Ynestra King is a writer and editor. She holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University. She is currently completing a memoir on issues of gender and disability. She is the editor of two books: Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment and Development (with Jael Silliman), and Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics(with Adrienne Harris).

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.

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. 

Jose Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy is an oral historian at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.  An expert in the biographical aspects of oral history and life writing, Dr. Sebe Bom Meihy has done extensive work in defining the uses of dreams as narratives in oral history, particularly in his interviews of immigrant women in the Dominican community.  His publications include The Life and Death of Carolina Maria de Jesus, The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus, and Brasil Fora de Si:  Experiências de Brasileiros em Nova York.

Linda Shopes is a freelance editor, project manager, and oral historian.  She has worked on, consulted for, and written about oral and public history projects for over two decades and currently coedits Palgrave's Studies in Oral History Series. Ms. Shopes is co-editor of Oral History and Public Memories (2008) and of The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History (1991); and author of the 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 a doctoral student in cultural anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she is pursuing research on historical memory, activist subjectivities, and political space in New York City.  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 an annual course at Columbia University Teachers College on “Oral History as a Multidisciplinary Teaching Tool.” 

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.