This panel features three multifaceted initiatives and highlight key approaches to community engagement and project sustainability.
About this event
This panel presentation and discussion features three multifaceted initiatives that model new approaches to Public Humanities research. As dynamic collaborations between academic institutions and civic organizations that bring together scholars, practitioners, and the public, each of these projects engage in boundary-crossing forms of knowledge-making that explore where public and humanistic concerns intersect. This panel introduces the three projects while highlighting some of key approaches to community engagement and project sustainability, including the crucial contributions of graduate student fellows.
I See My Light Shining: Oral Histories of Our Elders seeks to create an expansive archive of oral history interviews with people in targeted geographies across the United States, including New York City, the Deep South, the Greenwood District in Tulsa, and Native American reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, in an effort to capture unrecorded memories and life experiences before these stories are lost to history. From aging Civil Rights activists to Native American tribal leaders, those who are interviewed will also have the opportunity to have their family archives preserved, photographs, letters, and additional ephemera, preserving a vast array of histories to allow future generations to learn lessons from our times.
Project Presenters:
Madeline Alexander is a public historian and Project Manager for the I See My Light Shining: An Oral History of our Elders project. Prior to joining INCITE in 2022, she spent time at the Colorado State Museum: History Colorado, as an Engagement Coordinator for Black Communities. She holds a Masters in Public History from the University of York, UK (2021) and her Post-baccalaureate in Media Studies from Northwestern University (2019). Her thesis focused on how Afrofuturistic themes in U.S. television created by African Americans disrupts the White gaze. Her research interests currently focus on the interpretation and adaptation of historical narrative, theory and ethics in the media industry. As a freelance public historian, Madeline has worked on a variety of projects, including Rural Arts Center (UK) history education program in 2021 and as a Co-creator/Historical Consultant for a Isle of Mine, a documentary short that won second place in the Oolite Arts Center Documentary Short proposal 2019.
Mary Marshall Clark is the Director of the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research in INCITE and the co-founding director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) degree program. Mary Marshall has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991. She was the co-principal investigator (with Peter Bearman) of The September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project. Currently, Mary Marshall is a co-principal investigator and interviewer on the Obama Presidency Oral History Project. Mary Marshall is also co-principal investigator on the oral history project “I See My Light Shining,” created by Jacqueline Woodson and funded by the Emerson Collective. She is the past director of the recently concluded Human Rights Campaign Oral History Project, tracing the history of the Human Rights Campaign in advocating for the rights of LGBTQ people in the United States. Mary Marshall has directed projects on the Carnegie Corporation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Japanese Internment on the East Coast. She founded the Guantanamo Rule of Law Oral History Project in 2009. She has conducted life history interviews with lead figures in the media, human rights, African American history, South African history and recorded women’s achievements in journalism, politics and the arts. She writes on issues of memory, the mass media, fieldwork and ethics.
The Zip Code Memory Project seeks to find community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods. Through a series of art-based workshops, public events, social media platforms, and a performance/exhibition at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, community members re-imagine Zip Codes not as zones of separation, but as interrelated spaces for connectivity and mutual care.
Project Presenters:
Nancy Ko is a scholar of race, capital, and migration working at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. A Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Columbia University, her present research traces the consequences of the emergence of Sephardic identity politics in the global Middle East. Nancy holds an MPhil at the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a B.A. from Harvard University, where she was a founding organizer of the Open Hillel movement. She now teaches topics in history and philosophy at Columbia and Harvard, and proudly organizes with Student Workers of Columbia. Nancy is a recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. She can be heard in conversation with recent authors in History and Critical Theory over at the New Books Network.
Lee Xie is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at New York University. She holds a B.A. in Spanish (high honors) and Journalism (double major) from New York University. She works at the intersections of diaspora studies and feminist aesthetics: her dissertation considers how Chinese diasporas are remembered in contemporary feminist aesthetic practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her most recent essay, “Mapping Covid-19’s Transnational Implications for Women Workers,” was published in CUNY FORUM’s special issue, Corona Conversations: East & West. She is a grant awardee and lab member of the 2021-2 Cross/Currents H-Lab, funded by the NYU Center for the Humanities.
Leah Kogen-Elimeliah is a poet, essayist, short story and nonfiction writer from Moscow, currently living in New York City. She is an MFA candidate at City College of New York, is the Founder and Director of WordShedNYC Reading Series and an Editorial Associate for Fiction literary magazine. Leah has collaborated on various art/poetry projects with Benjamin Briones Ballet Company, independent choreographers and dancers as well as videographers experimenting with multimedia and poetry. She’s had her work featured on The Red Stage organized by Creative Time, The NYC Poetry Festival and The Higher Ground Arts Festival. Her writing focuses on immigration, identity, language, sexuality and culture. Leah lives in Manhattan with her husband and their children.
The Health and Medical Humanities Initiative provides an ongoing forum to study the influence of medico-scientific ideas and practices on society and work towards the establishment of a set of humanistic competencies that can inform medical practice. Seeking to foster conversations between medical practitioners, scholars, and patients on the diverse experiences of bodies in different stages of health and disease, MedHum builds upon and revises earlier notions of the ‘medical arts’ to explore new interdisciplinary frameworks for medical and humanistic ways of knowing.
Project Presenters:
Rishi Goyal is Director of the Medicine, Literature and Society major at ICLS. Dr. Goyal's research, writing and teaching focuses on the reciprocal transformations that result when new ideas about health, disease and the body find forms of expression in fiction and memoirs. His most recent work explores the political, aesthetic, and social dimensions of the representation of physical trauma in literature. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning. Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books among other places. Dr. Goyal received his MD (2001) and his PhD in English and Comparative Literature (2010) from Columbia University. He was Chief Resident in Emergency Medicine at New York-Presbyterian (2009-10). Before returning to Columbia in 2012, Dr. Goyal was Director of Medical Humanism and Assistant Professor of English Literature and Emergency Medicine at the University of Arizona where he was named Teacher of the Year (2011). He is currently an Attending Physician in the Emergency Department at Columbia University Medical Center and a Visiting Professor at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.
Arden Hegele, PhD, specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and the medical and health humanities. She is interested in the intersection of medical knowledge with formalist and historicist literary approaches. At Columbia, Hegele has taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, in the Medical Humanities major at Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She is a co-founding editor (with Dr. Rishi Goyal) of Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. Other projects include the direction of the Explorations in the Medical Humanities Series at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities; co-direction of the Motherhood and Technology Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference; coordination of the “Increasing Covid-19 Vaccine Confidence” project; and administration of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes Health and Medical Humanities Network, including hosting its Summer Institute at Columbia Global Centers | Paris. From 2019-2021 she was the Medical Humanities Fellow at the SOF/Heyman. Hegele's book, Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading was published by Oxford University Press in November 2021. Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities (Bloomsbury Publishing), the anthology she edited with Rishi Goyal, came out in November 2022.
Helen Zhao is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Columbia University, specializing in the philosophy of science and medicine. As the inaugural Graduate Fellow in Medical Humanities, she was the Network Administrator for the CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Network. She is an SoF/Heyman Public Humanities Fellow, and a member of the Motherhood and Technology Working Group and the Harvard GenderSci Lab. Her public humanities project, Birthing Publics: Supporting Maternal-Neonatal Health, aims to bring together pregnant mothers enrolled in New York City’s first guaranteed income program, clinicians at NYP/CUIMC’s Mothers Center, maternal-fetal effects scientists, and medical humanities scholars to critically discuss the needs of expecting parents from under-resourced NYC neighborhoods. Starting this fall, she will be a student at Yale Law School.
2023 NEPH Consortium
Along with the Bard Graduate Center, the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, and INCITE, OHMA is co-hosting the 2023 gathering of the Northeastern Public Humanities Consortium.
As part of the gathering, we are offering free, in-person workshops in the morning on Saturday, April 22 (our first in-person training workshops since 2020!) as well as a public panel on Friday, April 21, featuring INCITE's I See My Light Shining project. See and register for all public events here.