OHMA is the first and only program of its kind in the United States, a one-year interdisciplinary degree training students to record and amplify first-person stories using a range of technological, creative, and analytical tools. We teach oral history as a practice of co-creating dialogic, critical conversations about the past, in the present, which are oriented towards the future.

Oral history as an academic research practice has deep roots at Columbia, stretching back to the founding of the Oral History Research Office in 1948 by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist Allan Nevins. At OHMA we are building on that tradition of producing oral histories as primary source documents for the historian’s archive, while also centering creative production, social science inquiry, the oral history practices of indigenous people, and the many traditions of collective critical life history analysis such as popular education, consciousness raising, and testimonio.

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