The NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project
Feb 2023: The NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Photos by Ashley Gilbertson.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the gravest infectious disease crisis the United States has faced since the Influenza pandemic of 1918, and we fear that it will not be the last. Starting in March 2020, our team of sociologists, oral historians, and anthropologists at Incite and the Oral History Archives at Columbia began building an archive documenting New York City’s experience of the pandemic.
New York City was the early epicenter of this pandemic in the United States because of its international connections and the local density of its social life. The virus spreads most intensely in households, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Our archive focuses on New York—a city of neighborhoods—to illuminate and document the social structure of the pandemic.
We’ve noticed that in this crisis people’s perceptions and understandings change daily, sometimes hourly. This is why we started interviewing as soon as we could, in March 2020. Our work builds on our experience developing the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, and combines sociology and oral history to create a rich, composite picture of the struggle against COVID-19 as it evolved over the years that followed.
For this project, we conducted video interviews with narrators as many as three times over the course of 18 months. The voices from these interviews were enriched by written diaries chronicling daily life during the pandemic and survey data helping us understand more about our participants and their social lives.
This crisis highlighted structural fault-lines in our society as well as the strength and resilience of our communities, even as our society transforms in ways we do not yet understand. That’s why it was so important for those navigating the post-COVID future to hear the voices of those who lived through this period. Researchers, health workers and advocates, historians, artists, and policymakers will learn from listening to and watching New Yorkers talk about how we made it through this extended crisis.
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If you want to learn more about doing oral history in this period, we’ve compiled some resources.
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The NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project collection will be publicly available through the Oral History Archives at Columbia in late 2024.
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Artists, researchers, and others who would like to use the archive for non-commercial purposes can request permission from the research team, subject to rules and procedures.
Pleas submit a description of proposed use (up to 1000 words) to covid19archive@gmail.com.
Team
Peter Bearman, Project Director
Nyssa Chow, Co-Director
Mary Marshall Clark, Co-Director
Ryan Hagen, Co-Director
Denise Milstein, Co-Director
Amy Starecheski, Co-Director
Maurice Ivy Dowell, Former Project Coordinator
Contact
Funding
National Science Foundation
Board of Trustees of the American Assembly
Press
“NYC Cultural Institutions Preserve Pandemic Memories in Real Time” The City - 5/6/20
”¿Cómo volvemos a la normalidad después de esta pandemia?” Telemundo - 5/13/20
”In Trinity and Columbia, Twin Archivist Projects Map a Pandemic in Real Time” The University Times - 6/16/20
”Improvisation, Design, and Sociality during the Pandemic: A Conversation with Denise Milstein from the New York City COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive” Design and Culture - 1/29/21
Three Years Into Covid, We Still Don’t Know How to Talk About It New York Times 2/23/23