Oral History Interview Workshop for Non-Members
This is an interactive Oral History Interview techniques workshop where attendees will learn the skill of developing picture questions that inspire stories and memory-making. After a brief introduction to the terminology attendees will develop a deeper understanding of question construction and develop essential skills for conducting oral history interviews in collaboration with their fellow attendees.
About Dr Erin McCarthy
ERIN MCCARTHY is an Associate Professor of History in the School of Communications and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. She 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 repository for the black experience which houses the largest collection of African American oral histories. McCarthy contributed to the Consortium of Oral HistoryEducators' Preparing the Next Generation 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 an interactive Oral History Interview techniques workshop where attendees will learn the skill of developing picture questions that inspire stories and memory-making. After a brief introduction to the terminology attendees will develop a deeper understanding of question construction and develop essential skills for conducting oral history interviews in collaboration with their fellow attendees.
About Dr Erin McCarthy
ERIN MCCARTHY is an Associate Professor of History in the School of Communications and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. She 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 repository for the black experience which houses the largest collection of African American oral histories. McCarthy contributed to the Consortium of Oral HistoryEducators' Preparing the Next Generation 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).