ISERP Introduces the Oral History Masters in Arts Program

ISERP Introduces the Oral History Masters in Arts Program

by Mary Marshall Clark (Oral History)

Students come to oral history from a variety of disciplines and for many reasons, but lately many of them are connected by a sense of urgency. They want to learn to interpret the life stories that bridge the gaps among their interests, the academy, and the world. From June 8th through June 20th, the Oral History Research Office held its annual Summer Institute in Oral History, attended by students and faculty from Italy, Romania, Spain, Liberia, the United States, and Canada. The challenge of meeting the needs of fellows from around the world in two short weeks was one compelling reason to create the nation's first Master of Arts in Oral History (OHMA), a year-long degree program beginning under ISERP's umbrella in the fall of 2008. In its initial year, Peter Bearman and I will co-direct the program. I met Peter, director of the Paul Lazarsfeld Center in the Social Sciences and former director of ISERP, while taking oral histories about the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001. That multi-year collaboration showed me how valuable it is for oral history to have a deep grounding in the social sciences as the field stakes its claim in the academy. Peter and I have shared students and projects since, and the results reflect a form of social research that respects the narrative accounts of people academia often studies only from a distance.

OHMA is an interdisciplinary degree that acknowledges the core value of fieldwork to a variety of disciplines, and is designed to meet the needs of fieldworkers whose projects may originate in one discipline but migrate to another. History, sociology, literature, anthropology, psychology, journalism, public health and human rights all benefit from the collection and analysis of stories. Oral history, a field founded 60 years ago at Columbia University by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Allan Nevins, has developed theories of interviewing and interpretations of historical memory. It does so by adapting and modifying the frameworks of many different disciplines. Whether conceived of as a mosaic of intellectual life or, as one faculty member put it recently, an "import-export business," meaning scholars take histories from individuals and then "export" them to specific academic fields for broader applications, oral history mixes theories of self, society, culture, and historical change in an effort to create lasting historical records.

Glimpses of these intersections were revealed during the last two weeks of our annual institute, this year titled "Oral History, Advocacy and the Law." Two of the fellows who attended came to explore ways that oral history can be used as evidence in interpreting loss and trauma. Lance Thurner, a graduate of Indiana University who is starting OHMA in the fall, spent the last two years as a carpenter helping to rebuild New Orleans. Along the way, he began to hear stories about possible reasons for the massive scope of the catastrophe. In one haunting account a woman said she believed she saw someone bomb the levees. Alessandro Portelli, on faculty at the University of Rome, shared his work interpreting "wrong narratives" that often contain more narrative truth than official accounts. Lance left the institute more secure in his interpretation that for most poor New Orleans citizens, Katrina was read less as a natural disaster than as a crime.

Facia Harris, a young sociologist from Liberia, has spent the last two years collecting stories from girls and young women who suffer with fistula, a genital disfigurement that occurs as a result of difficult childbirth or female circumcision. As a trained radio journalist, she works with an NGO, "Straight from the Heart," which played a crucial role in the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. From the stories she has collected about the fistula epidemic in Liberia, a country with only a handful of urologists, she developed a media campaign that has led to nearly 200 cases being treated and increased medical treatment options. She hopes to return to New York to attend the Masters Program so she can continue to examine issues of gender through oral history and using those narratives develop public health and educational programs that meet the needs of women and girls in a new democracy haunted by years of political trauma.

Other fellows came to address gaps in scholarly work that rely upon oral history documentation and analysis. Lavinia Stan, a scholar at the Institute of Oral History at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (IOH), is one of the community of oral historians who use their work to interpret the memories of people who have lived under totalitarian regimes. Among other projects, the IOH has used oral history to study majority and minority in Central and Oriental Europe, memory and identity in ethnic and religious minorities in the communist period in Europe, and the anticommunist resistance in the collective memory of Romania. The IOH sent Lavinia to the Oral History Institute to learn from leading oral history scholars how to develop research projects, interpret suppressed memories, and engage in interdisciplinary research. During her time at the Institute, Lavinia realized that for much of her research the real challenge was to understand how to interpret oral sources, her primary resource for learning about the experiences of those who lived in exile. Similarly, Angela Cenarro, who is writing about the fascist welfare system in Spain, is interviewing children who were institutionalized in postwar Spain in order to explore an undocumented dimension of lived experience. (This will complement her previous book, La Sonrisa de Falange: Auxilio Social en la Guerra Civil y la Posguerra.) The recognition, in both cases, is that oral sources are different, more complex, contradictory, and often richer, than stories that have entered the written cannon. They require special interpretation and a new approach to historiography.

One goal of OHMA is to address questions raised from the communities of scholars, activists, and documentary workers who are drawn to oral history as we establish it as a field of study. These questions include: What is the relationship between history and memory in the transmission of oral narratives? How is social or collective memory formed in societies where mass media dominate the construction of personal and public stories? What function does political repression have in deforming narrative, both biographical and social, and what role does oral history play in the untangling of historical narrative after repression ends? We are fortunate in the first year of our program to have the Italian oral historian Luisa Passerini, author of Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Studies in Modern Capitalism (1987), to ponder these questions with us. Her work on memory and fascism, autobiography, group memory, gender, and migration has addressed all of these questions and influenced the course of what is now an international oral history movement.

OHMA curriculum includes a theoretical seminar on the uses of oral history in the arts and the social sciences, as well as courses on oral history fieldwork, oral history method and theory, oral history and radio documentary, oral history and literary narrative, and biographical research in the social sciences. We will also offer a series of public lectures, drawing from the rich work of local and international scholars who are making substantial contributions to the development of oral history as a field.It is often said in the field of oral history that stories, whether life stories or historical stories, are too big for any one scholar to interpret. Oral History encompasses the whole range of human experiences from the personal to the global, and maps the ways disconnected or fragmented narratives relate to each other in unexpected ways. Oral history respects the agency of telling as a form of research that connects disciplines. As the field of oral history grows these skills will have implications for interdisciplinary research as well as the flexibility to interpret rapid political, social and historical change.

What is most exciting to me as I write this introduction to our new program is that a decade from now oral history will have produced a generation of scholars working across the academy to connect the university to the world. The import-export business is an apt metaphor for a field rooted in living communities, exchanging cultural knowledge in order to increase cultural understanding.