Listening and Seeing with the Body in Mi

Long-time colleagues and friends, Mary Marshall Clark and Ann Cvetkovich will model collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to oral history that draw on their overlapping and shared interests in oral testimony as a genre of public feeling, witness, testimony and psychoanalysis. They have both, for example, contributed to Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Oral History and Narrative and Memory project and the Covid-19 Oral History Narrative and Memory Archive project. Ann Cvetkovich, a professor of gender and sexuality studies with training in literature, brings to the mutual conversation interests in queer theory, trauma, affect, archives, and creative approaches to method, as well as experience with interviewing artists and HIV/AIDS activists. Mary Marshall, director of the Columbia Center for Oral History, brings 21 years of building oral history projects on everyday life, politics, trauma, activism and the arts. As a psychoanalyst in training, she also brings the lens of psychosocial analysis to questions of suffering, of social difference and intersectionality. 

In addition to readings in theory and method, the course will focus on listening to oral histories with a sample interview for shared discussion each week.  The final project for the class will provide students with an opportunity to work intensively with an interview of their choosing, and there will be brief creative exercises along the way that will allow students to workshop and share their process as listeners and visual observers to the world of memory and affect.