Oral History Summer School was established in Hudson, New York, in 2012, as an immersive training program to help students from varied fields––writers, social workers, radio producers, artists, teachers, human rights workers––make use of oral history as an ethical interview practice in their lives and work (Read More: What is Oral History?).

Spanning the realms of scholarship, advocacy, media-making, and art, OHSS is a hands-on program, which means that students conduct interviews, design projects, produce radio documentary, and archive their recordings while learning the theoretical underpinnings of the field. We also offer advanced training in the form of focused workshops including those on memory loss, mixed ability interviewing, oral history-based documentary film, ethnomusicology, family history, and trauma.

We're a cross-disciplinary program with a strong belief that the field is best defined and explored with the guidance of instructors from the field of oral history and from adjacent fields/pursuits: social work, disability studies, ethnomusicology, trauma studies, grassroots organizing, medicine, documentary film, and more.

Our students have come from Italy, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, China, Canada, Spain, Turkey, Brazil, Panama, Nepal and all over the United States. OHSS alumni have gone on to apply their oral history training to exhibitions, policy work, branding, art projects, family history, mitigation and public health research, as well as collaborations with community organizations, institutions, and schools. You can read more about our alumni network and their accomplishments, here, and in OHSS Alumni newsletters I (2014) and II (2016).

In summer 2016, we offered our first workshop in Chicago, with the Studs Terkel Radio Archive and Chicago Torture Justice Memorials and returned to Chicago in 2017, to collaborate with the National Public Housing Museum. Read more about our workshops here.