The Oral History Association Publications Committee invites you to a virtual panel with authors Stephen M. Sloan and Mark Cave discussing their co-edited book Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe, published by Oxford University Press. This event launches a two-part conversation series connected to the 2026 OHA conference theme, “Landscapes of Memory.”
Pre-registration is required to receive the Zoom link. The event is free to attend.
Description of Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe (Oxford University Press, 2022).
“As uncontrolled development forces crises in the natural world, deeply ingrained human connections with the earth are changing. Oral history’s proven ability to explore issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality make it a uniquely effective methodology for bringing in new perspectives to our understanding of environments.
This book brings together interviews with a global range of activists, farmers, water system managers, victims of catastrophe, tribal trustees, wilderness rangers, reindeer herders, and foresters, among others whose life experience gives them special insights into human-environmental interaction and adaption. Commentary by oral historians examines how these stories can be used to better understand our relationship with the natural world. Oral History and the Environment takes what could seem broad and impersonal forces such as climate change and environmentalism. Land crystalizes their meaning through personal stories. It overturns narrow historical frameworks bounded artificially by national borders and instead portrays the issues facing our common ecosystems.”
Mark Cave is Senior Historian with The Historic New Orleans Collection. He created the oral history program at HNOC and developed oral history responses following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in 2010, and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 as well as the New Orleans Life Story Project and other smaller thematic projects. He has served on numerous OHA committees and is a past President of the International Oral History Association. He is co-editor with Stephen Sloan of Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis and Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe, as well as the recently published Global Handbook of Oral History with the late Selma Leydesdorff.
Stephen M. Sloan is a Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University. He also currently serves as the Executive Director of the Oral History Association. He is also a past president of the OHA and has chaired and served on a host of association committees. Stephen has won numerous awards for his projects, publications, and preservation efforts using oral history. His most recent publications are the co-edited anthology Oral History and the Environment: Global Perspectives on Climate, Connection, and Catastrophe and a co-authored book on remote oral history practice, Oral History at a Distance. In 2024, Dr. Sloan was named the Cornelia Marschall Smith Professor of the Year at Baylor University and a Big XII Faculty of the Year.
Moderator:
Jason A. Higgins is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing & Press and an assistant professor of history. His book, Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (UMass Press, 2024), received the 2025 Oral History Association Book Award. He is also the co-editor of Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (UMass Press, 2022). His forthcoming digital humanities publication, “Face to Face with Slavery,” is based on an oral history project in collaboration with descendants of the families who were enslaved on the land that Virginia Tech occupies. He currently serves on the OHA publications committee.