OHMA Fall Open House - Incite at Columbia University

OHMA is the first program of its kind: a one-year interdisciplinary Master of Arts degree

Can you envision yourself in our 19th cohort? The Columbia University Oral History Masters Program community is over 100 oral historians strong and growing! We're even offering two $10,000 Future Voices Fellowships to admitted students next year.

Please join us for an Oral History M.A. program open house on Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 6:00 p.m.

OHMA OPEN HOUSE

• Information session
• Learn about our new Future Voices Fellowship
• Meet OHMA students and alums
• Presentation by OHMA Alum: Auriana Woods
• Mini-interviewing workshop taught by, Amy Starecheski

OHMA is the first program of its kind: a one-year interdisciplinary Master of Arts degree training students in oral history method and theory. Our graduates work in museums, historical societies, advocacy organizations, media, the arts, education, human rights, and development. OHMA is also excellent preparation for doctoral work in fields like anthropology, history, journalism, and American studies or professional degrees in law, education, or social work.

Jointly run by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, one of the preeminent oral history centers in the world, and Incite Institute, a lively hub for interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences, OHMA connects students with the intellectual resources of a major research university and with the intimate society of a small cohort of talented students.

During a year at OHMA, students learn the skills of digital audio and video production and editing, digital archiving, oral history project design and interviewing, and both historical and social science analysis. Working with an OHMA faculty member, each student is guided through the process of creating a thesis or capstone project. Past projects have taken the form of academic and creative essays, film and audio documentaries, performances, exhibits, and multimedia websites. OHMA students also have access to elective courses taught anywhere within the University and exclusive oral history internship opportunities.

Alumni Speaker:

Auriana Woods (she/her/hers) is a historian of 19th century African American life and the Director of Getting Word, the African American history department at Monticello (the plantation home of Thomas Jefferson). While her work spans Black American history from slavery to freedom, she particularly focuses on fugitive kinship practices, family separation, and the forced migration of enslaved people from the Upper South to the Lower South and westward between 1800-1860.As a public-facing historian, Auriana works to reconstruct our collective understanding of American history and identity through filling historic silences, interrogating the consequences of a popular narrative that omits chattel slavery as a founding institution, and emphasizing the centrality of Black Americans in the founding of the United States. She is particularly invested in “re-membering” the histories of individuals who have been invisibilized by the violence of traditional archives, and engages in a historical practice that “challenges the known and the unknowable.” Auriana is a graduate of Columbia University’s Oral History M.A. Program (2022 cohort) and Brown University (class of 2019), where she studied Africana Studies.

Auriana will talk about her journey to/through OHMA (including the creation of her thesis project, Heirloom: A Family Archive), and how it has translated into her career in public history. She will share sections of her digital family repository and talk about the challenges and rewards of doing family oral history work, both privately and professionally.