Storied Lives: Methods in Oral History

Harvard FAS

How can we understand the lives of people who are excluded from the historical record? How might attention to the time and space in which words are spoken allow us to treat oral history as text, and text as oral history? This course explores storytelling as a foundational element of the human experience. It analyzes the myriad ways in which orality has been used to consolidate origin stories, document events, communicate embodied experience, and transfer ancestral knowledge. By centering…