Remembering Ronald J. Grele

Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research

For details on Ron Grele’s memorial on Jan 13, 2024, click here.

Ronald J. Grele, former director of the Columbia University Oral History Center for Research, former associate professor in the Columbia History Department and past president of the national Oral History Association died peacefully surrounded by family and friends in his New York City home on December 13, 2023.  Beloved by friends, family, students, and colleagues scattered far and wide, Ron shaped the oral history movement in the United States and around the world with his intellectual rigor, passion, and generosity.  Ron served as director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (then called the Oral History Research Office) from 1982-2000. As director, he used his expansive interdisciplinary knowledge and networks around the world to build a field made up of curious fieldworkers, brilliant academics and researchers, activists, and community-based workers from Harlem to Chinatown who helped define and expand the field of oral history for generations. 

As editor-in-chief of The International Journal of Oral History in the crucial years from 1981-1985, Ron engaged hundreds of oral historians in international conferences to write up their fieldwork and encouraged them to try their hands at developing oral history theory in interdisciplinary ways.  Current students still use the IJOH to inspire their own fieldwork and to devise interpretative frames. Ron was president of the OHA from 1987-1988 and took a leadership role in defining ethical standards for the practice of oral history nationally.  He traveled the world to present at oral history conferences and participated in the founding of the International Oral History Association.   In 1994, Columbia held a defining international conference that, for the first time moved international conferences beyond Europe and was inclusive of African, South American, and Latin American participation.

Ron also helped establish the Columbia University Summer Institute in Oral History, a two-week intensive training institute that has drawn thousands of students and scholars interested in oral history for over 27 years.  Through the Columbia History Department, Ron taught the graduate course Oral History Method and Theory to overenrolled classes. When at last the classes became too full, Mary Marshall Clark and Peter Bearman convinced the University to hold a full master’s degree program in Oral History [OHMA] that began in 2008.  Ron taught in OHMA along with close colleagues and leaders in oral history from the 1970s, Alessandro Portelli and Luisa Passerini. The interdisciplinary scholar Ann Cvetkovich, a former Rockefeller fellow with the Center in a Humanities program Ron co-founded in the late 1990s, currently teaches a course in OHMA with Mary Marshall Clark.  Most importantly Ron’s book, Envelopes of Sound, inspired students that they could learn to interpret fieldwork for themselves in their own cultural contexts which at the time was a radical thought and a thoughtful prediction of how oral history would grow.  Ron is a legend even to the students he did not directly teach. One student, learning of his death, wrote:

I can't believe that Ronald left! I am so sad to hear this! I am so lucky that I got chances to meet him at our workshops and see him asking questions seriously with bright eyes. Even though I have never talked to him one on one, I still feel connected with him in some way. His death is like a grandpa's death to me. A grandpa from the family of oral history. I will mourn him in my way and share this sad news with some Chinese colleagues who are influenced by Ronald's works. I am sad. From: Xiaoyan Li, graduate of the Oral History master’s program, 2018.  

Ronald Grele, right center; OHMA student Xiaoyan Li, far right.

Prior to coming to Columbia Ron directed the Oral History Program at UCLA and served as Research Director at the New Jersey Historical Commission and Assistant Director of the Ford Foundation Oral History Project. He began his career in oral history as an interviewer and archivist at the John F. Kennedy Oral History Program, housed at the John F. Kennedy Library. He was awarded a Fulbright teaching appointment at the University of Indonesia and has conducted workshops and seminars on oral history throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Fascinated by the potential of oral history to intervene in production of historical memory, Ron worked with his former student Peter Maguire, author of Facing Death in Cambodia, to train oral historians working at the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-CAM) taking oral histories of Khmer Rouge atrocities that were not publicly acknowledged for decades.

In addition to being the author of Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History (Prager, 1991, second edition), Ron was also editor of International Annual of Oral History: 1990: Subjectivity and Multiculturalism in Oral History (Greenwood, 1992).  Ron worked with a group of oral historians in Europe and the United States to document the 1968 revolution. These interviews were the basis of the book A Student Generation in Revolt: An International Oral History (Pantheon Books, 1988). He received his doctorate from Rutgers University and taught at Lafayette College, The California State University at Long Beach, and Kingsborough Community College. Ron served as a consultant on number of oral history projects and museums and historical agencies. He completed projects on the history of the Garrett Corporation in Los Angeles, McKinsey & Company, and the Boston Consulting Group. He has conducted biographical interviews for the Columbia Center for Oral History Research with women graduates of the Columbia Law School including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, along with hundreds of life histories over the years.  He also conducted numerous interviews in his retirement for the Columbia Center’s Rule of Law Project, the Carnegie Corporation Project, and the history of the Atlantic Philanthropies. Ron volunteered to conduct interviews for a community history project documenting the social and cultural history of Harlem. Ron had an abiding devotion to community history projects, and devoted years of volunteer service to the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas. He will be remembered as an oral history enthusiast who inspired thousands of conversations and publications about oral history as an art as well as a discipline, and permanently established oral history education at Columbia University.

Reflecting on Jeff Brodsky's legacy

Last week we learned that journalist, oral historian, and Columbia alumnus Jeffrey H. Brodsky passed away on July 26, 2023, at age 49 after battling Parkinson’s disease for the past decade. As we receive the news of his passing, our community is reflecting on his many important and enduring contributions to oral history at Columbia University and beyond.

We first met Jeff when he joined the Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program at Columbia as part of its inaugural cohort. Jeff’s contributions, both through his own practice and the support of others’, would shape the OHMA program for years to come. Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research and Co-Founder of the Oral History Master of Arts Program, reflects on Jeff’s time at Columbia:

Jeff and I had spent several months talking about what he might focus on for his thesis, bouncing ideas around. He was determined to find a thesis idea that was original and unique. One day while crossing campus I heard Jeff yell out as he ran towards me, “I found it, I found my thesis topic! I am going to interview politicians about their first campaigns!” I realized in the moment how brilliant it was, because it would capture the process of ‘becoming,’ the essence of what we do as oral historians. 

For his thesis, Jeff conducted over 80 oral history interviews in which politicians recounted their first political races. Those interviewed included Governor Mike Dukakis, Senator George McGovern, Civil Rights advocate Jesse Jackson, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield. The finished historical retrospective was published as a multi-page feature in The Washington Post and on NPR.

Mary Marshall Clark continues:

Jeff was a truly talented interviewer, able to open up dialogues that politicians and journalists rarely spoke about. Jeff represents the curiosity and creativity of OHMA students, as well as the fortitude to follow through on their dreams.

As part of his Oral History master's thesis, Jeff Brodsky interviewed White House Correspondent Sam Donaldson, US Senator Ron Wyden, and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Warren Buffet.

After graduating from OHMA, Jeff continued to capture and preserve critical memories of leaders in politics, journalism, and business. Expanding and internationalizing his thesis work, he interviewed a dozen world leaders about their formative political experiences and campaign memories. In 2012, Chief Executive magazine commissioned him to interview executives on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. He also conducted extensive interviews with Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Kann, the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones, and television news veterans Sam Donaldson of ABC and Bob Schieffer of CBS.

Jeff’s work will become available through the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Collection at the Oral History Archives at Columbia (OHAC). Kimberly Springer, Curator for the Oral History Archives at Columbia, comments on the impact of this collection:

The Jeff Brodsky Oral History Collection will be monumental not only in the scope and access he was able to achieve with his narrators in creating primary source materials, but also in demonstrating the range of considerations for oral history as a dynamic methodology. OHAC is incredibly grateful that the Brodsky family and Jeff took into consideration the archival and preservation aspects of his contribution to the field.

Jeff and his family have also supported the work of OHMA students through the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Announced in November of 2015, this award is given to one or more students annually 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, in 2022 the Brodsky family generously decided to expand the award and extend the funding for five additional years, allowing us to honor several students and their work each year.

2022 Brodsky Award winner courtney scott’s 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.

In the eight years it has been awarded, the Brodsky Award has allowed us to amplify work that, like Jeff's, pushes the field in new directions, from using AI to analyze oral history collections to writing speculative oral histories of the future. The Brodsky family's vision in creating this award has significantly deepened our practice of oral history, and we are grateful for the opportunity they have created.

Amy Starecheski, Director of the Oral History Master of Arts Program

As we reflect on Jeff’s legacy at Columbia and beyond, we invite you to engage with his work and on the work that his legacy has inspired and enabled.

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The Brodsky family asks that donations in Jeff’s name be made to:

Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications
P.O. Box 4114
Manchester, NH 03108

Emerson Collective and Columbia University to Support Jacqueline Woodson’s New Project “I See My Light Shining”

Project will equip 10 distinguished writers and storytellers to capture oral histories and artifacts from hundreds of elders from across the country

Jacqueline Woodson. Photo credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research and the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics is partnering with the Emerson Collective and Baldwin For The Arts to support acclaimed author and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Jacqueline Woodson’s new project: I See My Light Shining: Oral Histories of our Elders. Through Baldwin For The Arts, a group of talented and award-winning writers will be deployed to conduct oral history interviews with people in various regions of the country, capturing unrecorded memories and life experiences before these stories are lost to history.

“From aging Civil Rights activists to Native American tribal leaders, to survivors of Stonewall, many stories remain untold or beyond the grasp of museums and institutions,” Woodson said. “When these elders pass away, their records and accounts may go with them. Our project seeks to fill these gaps before it’s too late.” 

Woodson will guide the project creatively and has selected the cohort of 10 writers who will collect these histories, which will be housed in the Oral History Archives at Columbia University, one of the largest oral history collections in the world. 

We are pleased to announce this remarkable group of Baldwin-Emerson fellows:

• Natalie Diaz

• Eve Ewing

• Denice Frohman

• Caleb Gayle

• Robin Coste Lewis

• April Reign

• Carolina De Robertis

• Ellery Washington

• Renee Watson

• Jenna Wortham

Each fellow will conduct approximately 30 interviews with people in targeted geographies across the United States, from New York City, to the American Deep South, to the Greenwood District in Tulsa, to Native American reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. 

Those who are interviewed will also have the opportunity to have their family archival records preserved, including “home movie” footage, photographs, letters, and additional ephemera. The product will be an expansive archive of 300 interviews, alongside other media and documents, made available publicly and online, and with the potential to furnish museum exhibitions for visitors of all kinds. 

The project is funded by Emerson Collective, an organization dedicated to creating pathways to opportunity so people can live to their full potential. 

Columbia will serve in a curatorial and advisory capacity, adapting its longstanding expertise in oral history practice to help Woodson bring forth her vision. The work at Columbia will be co-directed by Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research and Kimberly Springer, curator of the Oral History Archive.

“Our collection is distinguished for the inclusion of all those who shape our world, not just ‘Great Men.’ We have and continue to build an archive that includes a vast array of histories so that current and future generations learn lessons from our times,” said Springer. “That’s why we’re thrilled to support Jacqueline in a project so consistent with that spirit.”

“We could not be more excited to work with Jacqueline to support her extraordinary vision and the gifted writers she has chosen to carry out the oral histories. The scope of this project is breathtaking. Our world will be better with the collection and sharing of these rich historical stories,” said Clark.

To kick-off the project, the fellows will take part in a series of oral history training sessions that will be led by Columbia’s oral history team, to conclude by mid-April. The interviews will commence shortly after and be complete by December 2022, with the goal of making the project accessible in the libraries and online no later than December 2023.

“We see such great promise in this project, and the partnership with Jacqueline and Columbia,” said Anne Marie Burgoyne, Emerson Collective’s managing director for philanthropy. “It has the potential to produce something lasting, not just in the records and recollections gathered, but in creating a new model for the preservation and inheritance of previously neglected histories.”

ABOUT: 

Emerson Collective

Emerson Collective is an organization dedicated to creating pathways to opportunity so people can live to their full potential. Using a broad range of tools including philanthropy, impact investing and policy solutions to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Established and led by Laurene Powell Jobs, Emerson Collective is working to renew some of society’s most calcified systems, creating new possibilities for individuals, families, and communities.

Baldwin For The Arts

Founded by Jacqueline Woodson in 2018, the mission of Baldwin For The Arts is to create a nurturing space for artists of the Global Majority to explore, create, and breathe, free from the distractions and hindrances of everyday life. As a 501c3 non-profit organization, Baldwin endeavors to change the artistic landscape so that it may reflect the world in which we live, challenging this field's history of leaving too many talented Global Majority artists of all ages, genders, and backgrounds unrecognized and unsupported. As a residency exclusively devoted to people of the Global Majority, Baldwin For The Arts is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of artists of all disciplines.

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research

As one of the world’s leading centers for the practice and teaching of oral history, the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) seeks to record unique life histories, document the central historical events and memories of our times, provide public programming, and teach and do research across the disciplines. CCOHR is housed at and administered by the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE). 

Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics

Leveraging the ideas and empirical tools of the social and human sciences, INCITE conceives and conducts collaborative research, projects, and programs that generate knowledge, promote just and equitable societies, and enrich our intellectual environment. It administers CCOHR and the Oral History Master of Arts program, the first program of its kind in the United States training students in oral history methods and theory.  

Oral History Archives at Columbia University Libraries

The Oral History Archives was founded by historian and journalist Allan Nevins in 1948 and is credited with launching the establishment of oral history archives internationally. At over 10,000 interviews, the Oral History Archives is one of the largest oral history collections in the United States. The archives are housed at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library in Butler Library at Columbia University and is open to all.

OHMA Director Amy Starecheski to oversee new oral history grant

The Oral History Association has been awarded $825,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan to create a fellowship program for under/unemployed oral historians, with a focus on oral historians from communities that have historically been marginalized in the field.

Amy Starecheski, Director of the Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program and 2021-22 President of the OHA, will serve as a Co-Principal Investigator on the grant alongside Louis Kyriakoudes, Director of The Albert Gore Research Center & Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University. The idea for the grant came from work Starecheski did with OHMA students.

OHA will be awarding eleven year-long fellowships of $60,000. Oral historians from communities which have been historically marginalized in the field (such as Indigenous peoples, people of color, people with disabilities, and working class people) are particularly invited to apply. Applicants will be encouraged to propose projects grounded in partnerships with communities and organizations. In addition to the fellowship award, fellows will be provided with mentoring, research funds, training, and a supportive cohort experience. Program details, including application materials will be available at http://www.oralhistory.org/neh 

As a part of this funding series, OHA will also be awarding up to a dozen smaller grants to support research into the history and current dynamics of the field of oral history, with the aim of creating knowledge that can be deployed to create a more equitable and inclusive field.

Announcement | Oral History Summer Institute canceled for the summer of 2021

It is with regret that the Columbia Center for Oral History and INCITE announce we will not hold next year’s Oral History Summer Institute, which we traditionally host on a biennial basis. With the lingering uncertainty of the pandemic, and the strong possibility that we would not be able to convene in person, we feel we would lose too much of the informal interaction and interpersonal connection among peers and faculty that is so important to the institute.

We strongly encourage those who may have been interested in the institute to stay engaged with our programming and look out for the many other workshops and events we will host remotely throughout the year!

Financial Times Magazine features Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Project

Credit: Financial Times

Lilah Raptopoulos of Financial Times Magazine wrote a wonderful piece about INCITE’s NYC Covid-19, Narrative and Memory Project, and what it feels like to be living through history.

Read it here: How will history remember 2020?

INCITE/CCOHR receives grant from NSF to compile and archive COVID-19 chronicles and oral histories

SECOND AVENUE IN MANHATTAN - BRYAN DERBALLA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES - MARCH 30, 2020, “NEW YORK WAS NOT DESIGNED FOR EMPTINESS”

The COVID-19 pandemic is the gravest public health crisis the United States has faced since the Influenza pandemic of 1918. It will not be the last. While disaster research is often retrospective by necessity, providing accounts of past actions and ongoing recoveries, COVID-19 presents an opportunity for social research in the middle of an unfolding crisis. This can give us new insight into risk perception and sensemaking under duress, community and organizational resilience, transformations in social structure, and real time adaptations to severe economic and social disruption. To that effect, we are pleased to announce INCITE has received a RAPID grant from the National Science Foundation to capture and archive the evolving, multi-dimensional impact of the COVID-19 crisis on New York City.

The RAPID grant allows us to continue the work we began weeks ago: collecting surveys, interviews, and written testimonials to create a contemporaneous record of the city’s battle with COVID-19 across the epidemic curve. New York is a critical site for understanding the course of this pandemic because it was an early epicenter of the disease in the U.S., because it has a robust municipal emergency management system with deep experience of past disasters health-related and otherwise, and because it is home to one of the nation’s strongest urban healthcare systems. We must rigorously document this emergency to better understand how it is unfolding, to better inform the recovery, and to learn lessons that will aid our fight against the next pandemic. This project does exactly that, by capturing a diversity of perspectives over the course of the pandemic, from its early stages to the time when it inevitably recedes.

If you are interested in contributing to the archive or have questions, please email covid19archive@gmail.com.

Audio | Oral History of Disasters and Pandemics (with Mary Marshall Clark)

A workshop led by Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Center for Oral History Research at Columbia University, on how to plan and conduct oral histories in communities affected by disasters and pandemics. Mary Marshall shared guidance on how to conduct life history interviews in the contexts of crises and disasters, including how interviewers can shield themselves from an overload of trauma, and how they can construct safe environments for narrators to tell their stories. The goal of this workshop is to provide oral historians with resources that have been proven in the field, and useful in a variety of contexts.

CCOHR Director Mary Marshall Clark leads a workshop on how to plan and conduct oral histories in communities affected by disasters and pandemics. Mary Marshall shared guidance on how to conduct life history interviews in the contexts of crises and disasters, including how interviewers can shield themselves from an overload of trauma, and how they can construct safe environments for narrators to tell their stories. The goal of this workshop is to provide oral historians with resources that have been proven in the field, and useful in a variety of contexts.

The workshop took place online through Zoom on Thursday, April 16th.

Obama Presidency Oral History completes first interview with Joseph E. Lowery

On Saturday, September 28th, the Obama Presidency Oral History officially completed its first interview, with advisory board member Karida Brown traveling to Atlanta to speak with Rev. Joseph E. Lowery.

Lowery was a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr., and one of the first civil rights leaders to endorse Barack Obama in 2008. We could think of no better person with whom to launch this project, and we're incredibly grateful he was willing to share his memories.

Mary Marshall Clark joins “The Brian Lehrer Show” for 9/11 Anniversary

CHAO SOI CHEONG/AP

Yesterday, Columbia Center for Oral History Research Director Mary Marshall Clark visited WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show for its September 11th anniversary show. In addition to discussing the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, Clark joined Lehrer as he accepted phone calls from audience members, who shared moving reflections on the events of 9/11 and the meaning it carries for them 18 years later. Listen below: