Thursday, June 27, 2019
5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Knox Hall 509, 606 West 122nd Street
Alessandro Portelli (Rome, 1942) taught American Literature at the Universities of Siena and Rome from 1973 to 2012. He is the founder and president of the Circolo Gianni Bosio, an independent organization for the study and promotion of people’s cultures, oral history, folk and social music. He served as Rome’s mayor’s advisor for historical memory (2003-2008) and in Roe city council (2005-6). In 2006 he was a member of the committee that established Rome’s House of Memory and History. His awards include the Oral History Association prize in 1999, 2003 the Viareggio Book Prize in 1999, and others. His books on American literature, oral history, popular music have been translated in a nubmer of languages., including English: The Dath of Luigi Trastulli and other stories. Form and meaning in oral history (1991), The Text and the Voice. Writing, speaking and democracy in American literature (1994), mThe Battle of Valle Giulia. Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (1997); The Order has been Carried Out.History, memory and meaning of a Nazi massacre in Roe (2003); They Say in Harlan County: an oral history (2011); Biography of a town. Terni, Italy, 1831-2014 (2017); Bruce Springsteen’s America: A dream deferred (2019).
Mary Marshall Clark is Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research located in INCITE and co-founder and former director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) degree program, created in 2008-09. Formerly, she was an oral historian and filmmaker at the New York Times. Mary Marshall has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991, was president of the United States Oral History Association from 2001-2002, and has served on the Executive Council of the International Oral History Association. She is an editor of After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 11, 2001 and the Years that Followed, published by The New Press in September, 2011. She is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Clark holds two master’s degrees from Union Theological Seminary.
Ronald J. Grele, an American historian, is director emeritus of the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research. Ron was director of the Center from 1982-2000. Ron was president of the national Oral History Association in 1998. He is the author of Envelopes of Sound, 1975, 2nd edition 1985. Ron has been a national and global leader in the field of oral history, and was the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Oral History, 1980-85. Prior to his career at Columbia University, Ron was director of the Oral History Program at UCLA. Ron was co-director of the Oral History Summer Institute until his retirement in 2000.
Daniel Wolff is the author most recently of "Grown-up Anger: Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the 1913 Massacre in Calumet, Michigan," (HarperCollins, 2017). His other non-fiction books include “How Lincoln Learned to Read,” a Chicago Tribune Editor's Choice pick; “4th of July, Asbury Park”, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice pick; “You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke,” a national bestseller which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award; and "The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back." The last grew out of a documentary film project on New Orleans Wolff co-produced with director Jonathan Demme, and which includes the nationally broadcast, "I'm Carolyn Parker." He was also executive producer on Demme's 2003 film set in Haiti, "The Agronomist." Wolff has published three collections of poetry, and his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Partisan Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. His essays can be found in publications ranging from Vogue to Wooden Boat to Education Weekly. He’s been nominated for a Grammy and collaborated with, among others, photographers Ernest Withers, Danny Lyon, and Eric Meola, as well as choreographer Marta Renzi, his wife.
This event is part of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research’s 2019 Summer Institute, “From the Margins to the Center: Narrating the Politics of Our Time,” co-sponsored by Columbia Journalism School and The American Assembly.