ERIN MCCARTHY is an oral historian and Associate Professor of History in the School of Communications and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. McCarthy has been teaching and training undergraduate students in the theory and practice of oral history since the fall of 2000. Her oral history class was the first college-level course to formally partner with the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project, and her students have contributed over 200 interviews to the collection. She is a former Columbia University Oral History Summer Institute fellow and a recipient of the Oral History Association’s Post-Secondary Teaching Award, and she has just been named a 2025-2026 Innovations in Pedagogy & Teaching Fellowship Fellow for The HistoryMakers, the digital database of the black experience and largest collection of African American oral histories. McCarthy contributed to the Consortium of Oral History Educators' Preparing the NextGeneration of Oral Historians: An Anthology of Oral History Educators (2006), and her article, “Is Oral History Good for You? Taking Oral History beyond Documentation and into a Clinical Setting: First Steps,” was published in the Oral History Review (2010).

This is a unique opportunity to study with Erin McCarthy. In this workshop Erin McCarthy will cover the theory and practice of oral history and interview best practices. The workshop will feature foundational steps and principles of core question creation. Participants will engage in real-life application of workshop concepts and will come away with the tools to research, structure, and conduct an Oral History Interview.

Spaces are limited for this workshop.
Members: $25
Non-Members: $50