A Reflection by OHR Editorial Board Member Lauren Kata and OHA Council Member Fanny García OHA members Fanny Garcia, Natalie Milbrodt, and Lauren Kata met up at this year’s OHS Festival in Nottingham, England. Traditional oral history conferences are foundational to our field. They are essential spaces where research is shared, members network, and meaningful, […]
The Spring 2026 issue of the Oral History Review features a Special Section on Oral History and AI. In it, Douglas A. Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries and designer of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) system, was a contributor to the Roundtable, “Main Essay: Oral
In her spring 2026 OHR article, “Crisis Oral History and the Asylum Timescape: Temporalities, Solidarities, and Affect in Interviews with Ukrainians with Temporary Protection in Italy,” Eleanor Paynter, who is assistant professor of Italian, Migration, and Global Media Studies in the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages at the University of Oregon, brings to light her
What is your project about and why does it matter? I am the project lead and creative director of The Derek Piotr Fieldwork Archive. I established the Fieldwork Archive as a web-based repository in August 2022 to preserve diverse representations of folklife via sound recordings I and other fieldworkers have made: ballads, hymns, tales, poems,
Oral History Project Focus: The Derek Piotr Fieldwork Archive Read More »
In her spring 2026 OHR article, “Documenting a Movement Ecosystem: Picture the Homeless, a Participatory Oral History Research Case Study,” Lynn Lewis discusses the relationships between participatory action research (PAR), community organizing, and oral history. In her Author Interview with OHR Editor Holly Werner-Thomas, she elaborates on the necessarily experimental nature of PAR and why it felt urgent
Author Interview: Lynn Lewis Describes How and Why She Became an Activist Read More »
By Jacey Anderson, Book Review Editor for the Oral History Review On March 4, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Jason A. Higgins. 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
Three OHR authors/articles were awarded the top prizes for Best Article at the 2025 OHA Annual Meeting: This article describes Professor Chansky’s collaborative undergraduate oral history projects that worked with a variety of community partners to document Puerto Ricans’ experiences with Hurricane Maria and its aftermath, and serves as a model for other crisis oral
Extra! Congratulates OHR Authors on Their 2025 OHA Article Awards Read More »
Announced by the OHA at their annual meeting in Atlanta, the Mason Multi-Media awards recognize “outstanding oral history projects, collections, exhibits, and multimedia presentations for the public.” According to Yolanda Hester, who chaired the committee that selected the winners and whose members included Max Peterson, Mark Caltrain and Simona Tobia, “As in previous years, we
Extra! salutes the 2025 winners of OHA’s Mason Multi-Media Awards Read More »
Q: Tell us about documenting the history of Minnesota’s deaf, deafblind, and hard of hearing community through oral-visual history. A: Although this community has a long and rich history in Minnesota, people’s stories were scattered across the landscape. This project let us collect these stories and fill a long-standing gap in the historical record. We went
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (Vintage Books, 2020) is a collection of essays and other writings by disabled people. This is not a book of oral histories or a book that uses oral history as a method, but it’s nonetheless an important book for oral historians. To clear up any confusion, there
Considering Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility through an Oral History Lens Read More »
First published in 1985, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language is now widely considered a landmark disability study. Tracing hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, a coastal Massachusetts island, Nora Ellen Groce discovered, in her historical investigation, an uncommon incidence of deafness over multiple generations on the island, but also that deaf residents were accepted and involved
by Beth Maser, CEO and President, History Associates Incorporated (HAI) At HAI, we have been closely tracking the insights and online concerns our colleagues in the records management, archives, and historical consulting industries are raising regarding the recent firings and layoffs at the National Archives. To that end, we were heartened to see Maegan Vazquez write a piece on
Guest Post: Continued Open Access to Our Nation’s Records is Critical Read More »
