SEMINAR

Listening to Women:
Documenting Women's Lives through Oral History
A six-week non-credit course meeting once per week for 2 hours

Wednesdays March 24, 2010 – May 5, 2010
6:30 – 8:30pm

Note: Class will not meet on Wed. Mar 31

Registration for this course is now closed.

"I took it for granted that like most of the billions of people who are born and die on this planet I was just an accident.  There was no reason for me.  Yet my life burned inside me.  Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation, and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant.  Something in me must have been waiting to stand up and demand to be counted.  Because eventually, when I was presented with an opportunity to talk about myself, I grasped at it."
— Nuala O'Faolain in her book Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (Henry Holt 1996)

Seminar Description and Objectives:
Click here for pdf of course syllabus
This seminar will introduce the practice of Oral History as an historical methodology, a unique narrative genre, and a tool in the reconciliation of social injustices. It will be interdisciplinary, drawing from history, sociology, memoir, and gender studies. We will examine oral history in all its forms -- audio, video, print, and exhibit -- and in a variety of settings -- museums, schools, archives, performance, radio, and online. In particular, we will consider the dynamics of listening to, recognizing, and validating the voices of women, who may not know their stories have an audience. In addition to learning the theory and background of oral history, students will learn the practical and technical information needed to conduct their own interviews.

Requirements:

Being prepared to discuss each week's readings is the only assignment.
All selected readings will be distributed via email (pdf) will be discussed on the date under which they are listed.  Some multimedia materials will be accessible online. 

Instructor Bio:

Sady Sullivan brings over a decade of story-collecting experience to her role as oral historian at the Brooklyn Historical Society.  Her interview technique demonstrates a merging of social science, journalistic, and Buddhist deep listening approaches.  Since 2006, she has led five oral history projects and conducted life history interviews with over 150 people, as well as trained and overseen the work of other interviewers helping to build BHS's oral history collection.  In addition, she manages the digitization of BHS's legacy oral histories, 11 projects dating back to 1973 encompassing over 200 interviews.  These oral history collections are available for listening through a searchable database in the Othmer Library.  She also edits and produces audio for exhibition, including In Our Own Words: Portraits of Brooklyn Vietnam Veterans (2007 – ongoing).  Before joining BHS, Sady Sullivan worked with the national program RadioNation with Laura Flanders, as well as Voices of Public Intellectuals, a radio series produced by Laura Roskos and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  She has studied with oral historian Susan Reverby and sociologist Rosanna Hertz at Wellesley College, cultural critic Ellen Willis at NYU, and feminist researcher Fern Marx at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women.

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