When: Thursday, April 16, 2020 - 3-5pm EST
Where: Online via Zoom

Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Center for Oral History Research at Columbia University, will lead a workshop on how to plan and conduct oral histories in communities affected by disasters and pandemics. Mary Marshall will share 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.

Mary Marshall directed the September 11,  2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, a longitudinal interviewing program with approximately 650 New Yorkers,  and working with Amy Starecheski (then educational director at the Center), supervised the “Telling Lives Oral History Program" working with affected youth in schools in Brooklyn and Chinatown.  Mary Marshall is currently working on a Columbia University Project on public health and the role of women who are frontline workers, “Nurses in Pandemics,’’ focusing on the role of front-line nurses during the West African Ebola outbreak (2013-16).  Mary Marshall is also working with a small team of researchers to pilot a series of interviews with New Yorkers on Covid-19.