Oral History & Biography

Goal course

At the end of the course, students are able to:
(1) understand the specificities of oral history and biography as sources and methods of historical research and assess their value.
(2) reuse oral history interviews and biographical texts as research data with the help of digital tools.
(3) prepare, conduct, transcribe and analyze an oral history interview, and store it in a digital repository for reuse.
(4) critically reflect on oral history and the biographical method and take up an informed position in (sensitive) academic debates on these sources and methods.

Content course

This is an intensive methodological course on oral history research and
the biographical method. In a series of seminars, you learn how to
assess, interpret and reuse oral histories and biographical sources for
historical research. You also learn how to conduct oral history
interviews by co-creating a collection with your fellow students on a
given topic. In 2022-2023 students collect oral histories among VU
alumni with a minority background in order to examine diversity and
inclusion at the VU from the 1980s onwards.