Oral history is often seen primarily as a practice, as a research method, consisting of recording and analysing memories. However, OH rather represents an elaborate interdisciplinary paradigm of historiography, situated at the intersection of new cultural history, historical anthropology and memory studies. Its main aim is to explore the culturally modulated ways in which people understand themselves in history, how they construct their historical subjectivity (identity) through their recorded narratives. The course will introduce students to the theoretical basis of the current dominant post-positivist oral history brand, typical of Euro-American academia. At the end of the semester, we will take a seminar reading of several key oral history texts.

Oral history is often seen primarily as a practice, as a research method, consisting of recording and analysing memories. However, OH rather represents an elaborate interdisciplinary paradigm of historiography, situated at the intersection of new cultural history, historical anthropology and memory studies. Its main aim is to explore the culturally modulated ways in which people understand themselves in history, how they construct their historical subjectivity (identity) through their recorded narratives. The course will introduce students to the theoretical basis of the current dominant post-positivist oral history brand, typical of Euro-American academia. At the end of the semester, we will take a seminar reading of several key oral history texts.

1) Introduction: oral history origins
2) What makes oral history different?
3) Representations of self
4) Subjectivity and intersubjectivity
5) Memory and memory studies
6) Narrative in oral history
7) Performance
8) Power and emancipation
9) Trauma and ethics
10) OH reading: Alessandro Portelli: Uchronic dreams
11) OH reading: Alistair Thomson: ANZAC memories
12) OH reading: Lynn Abrams: Liberating the female self
13) Semestral written test - 1st term

- good attendance (at least 75 %)

- written semestral test with 4 open questions. Each answer can be awarded with 0-3 points.
Grading: 12-10 pts = 1, 9-8 = 2, 7-6 = 3, less than 6 points = Fail

- grade composition: 80 % written test, 20 % attendance

* Compulsory reading
- Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory - 2nd Ed. (Routledge: London, 2016).
- Lynn Abrams, „Liberating the female self: epiphanies, conflict and coherence in the life stories of post-war British women,“ Social History 1/39 (2014): 14-35.
- Alessandro Portelli, „Uchronic Dreams: Working-Class Memory and Possible Worlds“, in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories. Form and Meaning in Oral History (SUNY Press: 1991), 99-117.
- Alistair Thomson, ANZAC Memories. Living with the Legend (Monash University: Victoria, 2013), Chapter 3 "Memories of War", 81-120.
- Alistair Thomson, „Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History,“ The Oral History Review 34/1 (2007): 49-70.

PDF files with required readings will be distributed by email to all registered students at the beginning of the semester