Amy Starecheski - Incite at Columbia University

Amy Starecheski is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian whose research focuses on the use of oral history in social movements and the politics of history, value, and property in cities.

She is the Director of the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University and served as 2021-22 President of the Oral History Association. In 2022, she received the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. She consults and lectures widely on oral history education and methods, is co-author of the Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide, and co-founded the Pedagogy of Listening Lab. She was a lead interviewer on Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project, for which she interviewed Afghans, Muslims, Sikhs, activists, low-income people, and people who lost work.

From 2020–2023 she was Co-Director of the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Project. Starecheski was a founding member of the Core Working Group for Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change from 2011-2018, where she facilitated the Practitioner Support Network. In 2015 she won the Oral History Association’s article award for “Squatting History: The Power of Oral History as a History-Making Practice” and in 2016 she was awarded the Sapiens-Allegra “Will the Next Margaret Mead Please Stand Up?” prize for public anthropological writing. She received a PhD in cultural anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she was a Public Humanities Fellow. Her book, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, was published in 2016 by the University of Chicago Press.

She is the founder of the Mott Haven Oral History Project, which collaboratively documents, activates, and amplifies the stories of her longtime neighborhood, as told by the people who live there. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and Radcliffe Library.