Each summer in New York City, CCOH sponsors an annual Summer Institute, which brings together oral historians, scholars, activists, and others for two weeks of advanced training in the theory and practice of oral history. Participants work with world-class instructors, network with oral historians from around the world and go to exhibits in New York City. Each year we focus on a different theme.

The Columbia Center for Oral History is proud to announce its 2012 Summer Institute, “What is Remembered: Life Story Approaches in Human Rights Contexts,” to be held June 4-15, 2012 at Columbia University in New York City.  Sessions will explore the methodological and theoretical implications of doing life story research with individuals who have suffered human rights abuses and other forms of discrimination.  The institute will focus on the role of oral history in documenting such histories, but also in interpreting the strategies of resistance and survival of creative individuals and communities that have lived through difficult times.

General themes of the institute will include: the challenges of doing fieldwork in post-conflict societies, including remembrance of personal violence; the uses of oral sources in expressing emotion and facilitating constructive actions; and the uses of informal and official forms of life histories in addressing the tensions between individual and collective remembering.  The Institute will also include practical workshops in digital storytelling, interviewing and editing.

Core faculty will include:

• Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History and co-director of the Oral History Master of Arts Program at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy of Columbia University;
• Alessandro Portelli , Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Rome-La Sapienza;
• Representatives from the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada;
• Taylor Krauss, Executive Director of Voices of Rwanda;
• Douglas Boyd, Director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries;
• Ronald J. Grele, Director Emeritus of the Columbia Center for Oral History;
• Linda Shopes, Editor and former President of the Oral History Association.

CCOH staff, students from the Oral History Master of Arts Program (OHMA), and others who have worked in the archive will enrich our discussions with their interpretations.

A draft program is available for download here [pdf] [doc].

The application deadline for the Summer Institute has now passed. Due to an influx of applications, all applicants will be notified of their status by Tuesday, April 17, 2012.

Low-cost on-campus housing will be available for those outside of the New York City area.

Our 2011 Summer Institute, “Rethinking 9/11: Life Stories, Cultural Memory and the Politics of Representation,” was attended by 18 fellows from the United States, Canada, Ireland and South Africa.The Institute was held from June 13-14, 2011. Drawing on the Oral History Research Office’s extensive September 11, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project, faculty and fellows explored the political, cultural, psychological, ethical and personal dimensions of documenting urban injury and recovery.

Peter Bearman, Mary Marshall Clark, Gerald Albarelli and Amy Starecheski spoke about the creation and interpretation of narratives of September 11 taken in the weeks and years after the events. The focus of the institute was broadened by presentations by Alessandro Portelli on his work on Harlan County, as well as life stories of victims of terrorism in Italy, and Ghislaine Boulanger on her work after Katrina. Irum Shiek’s presentation on her book, Detained without Cause: Muslim Stories of Detention and Deportation in America after 9/11 and the fieldwork that led to it was a deep intellectual contribution to the process of “re-thinking” 9/11.

Download the complete 2011 Summer Institute program.

2010: Oral History from the Ground Up: Space, Place, Memory. This year’s institute examined the meaning that space, place and memory hold in producing individual, social, cultural and political narratives.

2009, Narrating the Body: Oral History, Narrative and Embodied Practice
This year’s program explored issues, stories and performances tracing the history of the body, as well as oral history as an embodied practice

2008, Oral History, Advocacy and the Law
This year’s program explored the parallel uses of oral history and legal testimony in the classical definition of advocacy as “finding and giving” voice, and looked at human rights commissions, tribunals and oral history documentation.

2007, Telling the World: Oral History, Struggles for Justice and Human Rights Dialogues
This year’s program explored how oral history theory and method contribute to an understanding of the political, historical and personal dimensions of human rights dialogues. Joining us in the creation of this year’s program was the International Center for Transitional Justice.

2006: Women's Narratives, Women's Lives: Intersections of Gender and Memory
This year’s program featured presentations on such topics of gender and memory in illness and activist narratives.

2005: Living to Tell: Narrating Catastrophe through Oral History
This year’s program focused on the challenges of using oral history to document catastrophe in its immediate aftermath and beyond.

2004: Constructions of Race and Ethnicity from Past to Present: Negotiating Collective Memories through Oral History
This year’s program focused on the role of oral history in creating and critiquing representations of race and ethnicity in collective memory, popular culture and individual life narratives.

2003, Telling Lives: Memory, Orality and Testimony in Oral History
This year’s program explored the use of testimonies in discourses on marginalized communities, and how such testimonies subvert and correct public myth and memory.

2002, Oral History in Contemporary Contexts: Documenting Narratives of War, Conflict and Displacement in the Era of Globalization
This year’s program focused on the challenges of using oral history to document war, conflict and displacement in situations of both immediate and remembered trauma.

2001, Documenting Memories of Struggle and Resistance: Social Change and Social Memories
This year's program focused on the complexities of documenting memories of social and political change through individuals’ remembrances.