I'm excited to be teaching two workshops this summer in my Brooklyn home.

Workshops

The Summer Oral History Workshop will most likely comprise of six sessions (or the equivalent), guiding participants through oral history project design and implementation. The workshop will cover interview techniques, audio tutorials, grants/funding, reciprocity, ethics, and all the elements of an oral history project design.

We'll discuss life histories, community histories, family histories, institutional histories, testimony, and other sub-categories, while looking at the broad range of disciplines/subjects that oral history can address (public health, war crimes, memory...). I'll be introducing some innovative and unusual project designs, including the oral history chain letter.

This course is appropriate for the beginning oral historian or for those of you looking to focus on your project design, with the benefit of deadlines and critique.


Experiments in Autobiography will challenge students to redefine previous notions of "autobiography" and "memoir," delving into memory and experience to write about the world. We will look at the 1990s memoir trends and buck those trends, without abandoning the project of autobiography. How can we write about the news and the newspaper in first person? How can we write about history in first person? How can we write in first person without using "I"? We will also collaborate to compile a group of meaningful examples--autobiography in unexpected places--while working on weekly exercises and in-class writing assignments.