Congratulations 2024 Spring Research Grantees!

Please join us in congratulating OHMA/GSAS Research Grant recipients, Ananya Garg (2023), Clarissa Shane (2023), and Florencia Ruiz Mendoza (2022)!

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Ananya Garg

Ananya Garg is completing her thesis project on chosen family networks in LGBTQ+ South Asian communities. She is conducting interviews with community members and leaders, and documenting important community gatherings. 

The project aims to provide a space to honor chosen family networks, as they are not recorded and valued in the same ways as blood family networks are. Additionally, the project seeks to offer a blueprint to future generations of queer and trans South Asian people on how to build chosen family networks for themselves.

Clarissa Shane

Clarissa Shane sitting in an Agave cultivation during fieldwork with wild plant medicine practitioners in Paredones, Michoacán, Mexico (their mother’s ancestral land).

Clarissa Shane will be focusing on plant medicine with the goal of capturing the cultural, traditional, and personal narratives of plant knowledge keepers. They intend to speak to women of diasporas who approach plant medicine healing as care work and as connection to their ancestral lands. They will be using the OHMA/GSAS grant to attend the Chacruna 2024 Plant Medicine Conference and to research various cultural ways of knowing wild plants.

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Florencia Ruiz Mendoza

In Florencia’s project, “Voices from Wupatki,” several First Nations peoples reflect on their experiences and connections with Wupatki National Monument, an ancestral archaeological site in Arizona. Florencia will direct the totality of this grant to transcribe at least six hours of recording. The interviews represent cultural legacy because of their content, and having them transcribed will allow their dissemination to a broader audience. 

Faculty News Spring 2024

Catch up with our faculty!

After twelve years deeply engaged in teaching OHMA students, for the 2024-25 academic year OHMA Director Amy Starecheski will be on sabbatical leave. 

We are thrilled to announce that OHMA core faculty member Nyssa Chow will serve as Interim Director.

Nyssa Chow has been a beloved member of OHMA’s faculty since 2019, teaching courses on Multimedia Storytelling and our core Roots and Branches of Oral History course. She is also an OHMA alum — her thesis, an immersive literary oral history project, won the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Her creative and teaching practices focus on the intersection of art and oral history; embodied knowledge and listening; and literary oral history.

Born and raised in Trinidad, she holds an MFA from Columbia University’s Film program in addition to her OHMA degree. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University; she is the Lead Artist Facilitator for the 2021 and 2024 DocX Labs at The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, co-created with Stephanie Owens and Martine Granby. She was the 2019-2021 Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2018 recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein for Literary Oral History. Chow has collaborated with filmmakers and artists, most recently with Jennifer Wen Ma, on her exhibition ‘An Inward Sea’ for the New Britain Museum of Art. Her solo exhibition ‘Still. Life.’, a series of installations using sound, light, and assemblage, was held at Gallery One in Trinidad. Her artwork Trace: A Memorial was featured in the group exhibition ‘How We Remember’ (2021) at the Miriam and Ira D Wallach Art Gallery in New York City. Her work will be featured in ‘Re-collections’(2024), an upcoming exhibition hosted by The LatinX Project.  She has conducted oral histories on behalf of arts institutions such as the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Mott Haven resident Nieves Ayress sharing her stories at a Mott Haven Stories of Activism event

During her sabbatical year — with the support of a Community and Cultural Resilience Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Lecturer Professional Development Grant from Columbia University —  Amy will work with the Mott Haven History Keepers and other Bronx neighbors to learn more about ways of doing oral history that are not grounded in university spaces. As part of that research she will be the Anthropologist-in-Residence at the Bronx County Historical Society for the year. She will also spend time as a Visiting Scholar at Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, to learn more about how university-based oral history programs can be accountable to and engaged with broad constituencies, including students, faculty, and community members.

Completed projects

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New books!

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Completed projects 〰️ New books! 〰️

Sara Sinclair, who teaches our Indigenous Oral Traditions and Anti-Colonial Oral Histories course, just completed work in her role as Director of the Aryeh Neier Oral History Project for Columbia’s Center for Oral History Research. Her  work on the project included a 12 session interview with Aryeh Neier himself, which comprises over 400 pages of his reminiscences. 
In addition, “You Were Made for this World,” an Indigenous authored anthology of letters for young people, that she co-edited with her sister Stephanie, will be coming out July 29, 2024 (Tundra/Penguin Random House) - stay tuned!

Nicki Pombier, who co-teaches our Serious Play: Oral History and the Art of Story class, is a collaborating artist on File/Life, which has received the 2024 Large Institution Award: Honorable Mention from the National Council on Public History and The Kimmel Family Accessible Experience Award, presented by Art-Reach. File/Life is a community-led creative exploration of the Pennhurst archives by seven archivists, all people with disabilities and/or family members, including two former Pennhurst residents. These community archivists share stories that made them listen, feel, imagine, and remember. In doing so, they ask the question: Can a file ever contain a life?

File/Life is now installed in its third location, in the Helix Gallery at Thomas Jefferson University, where they're working with a group of medical humanities students to plan forthcoming public programming. Details here.

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Congratulations 2023 Research Grantees!

Please join us in congratulating OHMA/GSAS Research Grant receipients, Christine Stoddard (2023) and Maya Gayer (2023)!

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Christine Stoddard

Adriana Ascencio, a Salvadoran-American actress, holds a paper pulp mask that Christine made for her play "Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares" at The Tank in New York City. This was one of the costume pieces that Adriana used while performing in the play. The photo was taken at the end of the third interview Adriana and Christine completed this fall.

Christine Stoddard will be doing research related to women of the Salvadoran diaspora, with trips scheduled for Mexico, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and El Salvador. In addition to filming interviews, she will be visiting and photographing archives, museums, and archeological sites related to El Salvador's civil war, the Indigenous people of Central America, and contemporary cultural production by Salvadoran-Americans. This includes Proyecto Laberinto near Santa Ana, El Salvador and Casa Lü in Mexico City, both artist residencies.

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Maya Gayer

Photo by Amnon Horesh.

Maya’s thesis project focuses on building an oral history archive of Israel’s Democracy Protest Movement. Active since January 2023 in an attempt to stop the judicial overhaul led by the Israeli right-wing government, this is the largest protest movement in the country’s history and one of the most persistent in recent global history.

The archive’s aim is to serve as a public knowledge resource for scholars and activists across the world fighting against democratic deterioration and the rise of populism, and for future Israeli generations.

Announcing the 2023 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award Winners

Every year since 2016, OHMA has awarded the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award to a student whose thesis makes an important contribution to knowledge and most exemplifies the rigor, creativity, and ethical integrity that OHMA teaches its students.

This year our announcement of the winners of this award is bittersweet. Last month, we learned that Jeffrey H. Brodsky passed away at age 49 after battling Parkinson’s disease for the past decade. As we receive the news of his passing, our community has been reflecting on his many important and enduring contributions to oral history at Columbia University and beyond.

For 2023, the selection committee, consisting of OHMA Director Amy Starecheski, Incite Director and OHMA Co-Founder Peter Bearman, and 2022 Brodsky Award-winner Courtney Scott, has chosen three theses to receive prizes. All theses submitted from October 2022-May 2023 were eligible for consideration.

2023 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award Winner

2023 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award Winner

The winner of this year’s Brodsky Award is Bronte Gosper for her essay, “Collapsing Time: Indigenous Storytellers and the ‘Everywhen.’”

Oral history always happens within a layered temporality - within more linear conceptions of time we often talk about it as a conversation about the past, happening in the present, and oriented towards the future. Bronte’s essay proposes an Indigenous approach to non-linear time and narrative in oral history. She pushes back against traditional uses of Indigenous testimony, particularly in Australia, which have have narrowly focused on Indigenous suffering while placing Indigenous sovereignty in the past and projecting settler sovereignty into the future.  Building on the approaches to speculative oral history developed by Taylor Thompson and addressing calls for “liberatory archives” that reject “white time” by Michelle Caswell, Bronte Gosper explores what oral history looks like within the “Everywhen” of Aboriginal people who are epistemologically grounded in the Dreaming. How does oral history work when time is non-linear, and deeply tied to land? Recording oral history in place and in motion, woven throughout everyday life, she demonstrates a deeply anti-colonial oral history practice.

We are also awarding prizes for breaking new ground methodologically to two additional students - Christopher M. Pandza and Rebecca Kiil - who created exceptional work. Each will receive a cash prize of $1500 and be invited to present their work in this year’s Oral History Workshop series, which will explore methodological experiments in oral history.

Bettmann/Getty Images

In “Using Natural Language Processing to Organize and Analyze Oral History Projects,” Christopher M. Pandza does the essential work of introducing oral historians to the possibilities of using Natural Language Processing (NLP) for both organizing and analyzing large collections of interviews. Using the thousands of interviews in the Ellis Island Oral History Project as a case study, he deploys NLP in two quite different ways. First, he creates a process to efficiently extract consistent metadata, previously unavailable, from transcripts. Second, he develops a method to identify topics in the oral history interviews, and uses that tool to address a core question in oral history: How does shared authority work, in practice? By analyzing the frequency with which narrators and interviewers bring up immigration-related topics and/or continue discussions of immigration once they are raised, he is able to show that while both parties are shaping the conversation, in this case interviewers are doing more work to focus the conversation on the project’s research focus than narrators are. Oral historians need more tools to make sense of the stories they record, especially in large collections. Lack of knowledge and expertise as well as ethical qualms have held the field back from deploying qualitative research tools in general, and AI-based tools specifically. By rigorously addressing the potential ethical issues and clearly explaining how these tools can be used, Christopher M. Pandza has made a significant contribution to the field, one which he and others can now build on as these tools rapidly evolve. 

Rebecca Kiil’s thesis, “Roots of Silence: How Retracing My Family’s WWII Escape Routes and Bearing Witness to Their Breaking of Long-Held Silences Unexpectedly Led Me to Compassion, an Open Heart, and My Voice,” is a culmination of a decade of work to uncover her family’s World War II experiences fleeing Estonia, and make sense of their intergenerational impacts. She deploys research on intergenerational trauma, embodied memory, and oral history approaches to shared authority to create a multi-genre and multi-media account combining writing, audio, film and “fantasy oral history,” a genre of speculative oral history she created. The thesis is grounded in oral histories with multiple generations of family members, family records (including diaries, photos, and letters), archival research in Estonia and Siberia, and field research along the routes her family took to escape. With the fantasy oral history, Kiil expands recent work on speculative oral history, much of which has been future-focused, into the past. This very personal account of intergenerational memory and trauma provides a detailed account of how memory lives in the body, and charts a path to healing through creative and rigorous memory work. 

Please join us in congratulating our winners!

Announcing the 2022 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award Winner and Runner Up!

Every year since 2016, OHMA has awarded the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award to a student whose thesis makes an important contribution to knowledge and most exemplifies the rigor, creativity, and ethical integrity that OHMA teaches its students. 

To more fully acknowledge the depth and breadth of excellence in OHMA theses, we are thrilled to announce that the Brodsky family has generously decided to expand the award and extend the funding for five additional years.. Starting this year we will be able to honor several students and their work. 

For 2022, the selection committee, consisting of OHMA Director Amy Starecheski, INCITE Director and OHMA Co-Founder Peter Bearman, and 2021 Brodsky Award-winner Taylor Thompson, has chosen three theses to receive prizes. All theses submitted from October 2021-May 2022 were eligible for consideration.

Courtney Scott’s “‘I Am Your Nanny’/I am [not] your [m]other”

The winner of this year’s Brodsky Award is Courtney Scott (advisor: Nicki Pombier), for “‘I Am Your Nanny’/I am [not] your [m]other”. Through film, poetry, collage, photography, and edited audio, Scott explores the experiences of career nannies working in New York City. Scott’s work fulfills the promise of oral history - to amplify the complex and full voices of those who are not typically invited to speak in public. In five beautifully-edited audio episodes, Scott tells the stories of five nannies: their own childhoods, the women who raised them, their paths into nannying, saying goodbye to children they have cared for, and their relationships with their own biological children. Courtney Scott’s reflective writing around these creative pieces is compelling, thoughtful, and deeply grounded in the work of Black feminist scholars of care work, including Patricia Hill Collins and Dorothy Roberts. This is a project that took time to develop, in part because nannies are often precariously employed, with employers expecting discretion as part of the job. By shifting her focus from employer-employee relationships to love and motherwork, Scott found a way to honestly portray these experiences in their full complexity without putting narrators at risk. This work relied on trust, reciprocity, and affinity - Scott herself is a longtime nanny and professional careworker. Through time, love, and creativity, this moving and deeply rigorous thesis makes a significant contribution to public knowledge about care work and to oral history conversations about reciprocity and risk. In recognition of her accomplishments, Courtney Scott will receive a cash prize of $3000 and will present her work in the annual Brodsky Award Lecture at 6PM ET on March 23. Register here.

We are also awarding prizes to two additional students who created exceptional work:

Max Peterson’s “Real World History: Intergenerational Learning & Student Oral Histories of the Great Migration”

Max Peterson (advisors: Cosby Hunt, Kelly Navies, and Amy Starecheski) has been awarded the 2022 Brodsky Award for Excellence in Education. In “Real World History: Intergenerational Learning & Student Oral Histories of The Great Migration,” Max tells the story of the Real World History Project, in which Washington D.C. high school students interview D.C. elders. In this meta-oral history, we learn the story of how Real World History was created and evolved, providing important insights into the challenges and opportunities of teaching young people to be oral historians. Through analyzing the student oral histories archived at DigDC, Peterson shows that oral histories conducted by young people can make significant contributions to the historical record not only in terms of information about the past, but by documenting the intersubjective relationships of knowledge transfer between generations. The Real World History collection not only tells us new things about the Great Migration, it helps us understand how and why elders tell young people about the past.  In recognition of his accomplishments, Max Peterson will receive a cash prize of $1500.

Sach Takayasu’s “Microphones & Brushes: An Exercise in Radical Engagement”

Sach Takayasu (advisors: Jessica Benjamin, Francine Spang-Willis, Tomoko Kubota, and Amy Starecheski) has been awarded the 2022 Brodsky Award for Creative Collaboration. In “Microphones & Brushes: An Exercise in Radical Engagement,” Takayasu has developed a new methodology for doing oral history. Struggling to fully understand her mother’s experiences as a teenager in Japan during World War II, Takayasu decided to try painting images from her mother’s stories, and asking her mother for feedback on them, to see if she was really able to immerse herself in her mother’s world. It took many drafts (and meticulous historical research) to arrive at paintings that Sach’s mother agreed were accurate. Some things could not be remembered or found in the archives, however, that in itself provided new insights. This innovative approach allows for a new way to explore the deeply embodied, multisensory, and dialogic practice of oral history. By rigorously and  imaginatively documenting the experience of a teenager who lived through the Firebombing of Tokyo, Takayasu also contributes to our historical understanding of everyday life in Japan during WWII.  In recognition of her accomplishments, Sach Takayasu will receive a cash prize of $1500.

Please join us in congratulating the winners!

Seeking OHMA Teaching Artist for 2022-23

The Oral History Master of Arts Program at Columbia University is seeking a Teaching Artist to join our faculty team for the 2022-23 academic year.

The Teaching Artist will work closely with our faculty and students throughout the year. In the Fall semester they will curate and host our Oral History Thursdays public programming series (4 events), in which they will also be invited to present their work. In the Spring semester, they will teach a course on multimedia storytelling, work with OHMA’s Director to curate our end-of-year exhibit, and teach one of our signature online public training workshops. During the spring and summer, they will advise a group of up to five students on their thesis work. Compensation is $20,000.

Read more about our faculty, students, and existing courses: http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/

Qualifications:

·  Experience teaching, ideally with diverse groups of graduate or advanced undergraduate students.

·  Active creative practice.

·  Knowledge of oral history, storytelling, multimedia production, documentary arts, or related fields.

·  Practitioners from backgrounds historically marginalized in the field are particularly encouraged to apply, including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.

·  Advanced degree required.

·  Must be able to teach in person in New York City.

To apply:

For the first stage of this process, please send a cover letter, CV, and sample of your creative work to ohma@columbia.edu by July 5, 2022, with the subject heading “Teaching Artist.” 

In your cover letter, include brief descriptions of

·  how you would conceptualize and structure a 14 week multimedia storytelling course

·  your approach to and experience with teaching and creating inclusive learning communities

·  some ideas for how you might curate a 4-event public programming series for us in the Fall

·  a description of your own creative practice and how it relates to our work in oral history