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Prefatory Note

*Although Caroline West does not explicitly describe Wrong Women: Selling Sex in Monto, Dublin’s Forgotten Red Light District as an oral history, the back cover copy states that the book “draws on oral history” to tell the stories of women who lived and worked in Dublin’s Monto district. My critique, therefore, proceeds from the perspective of an oral history student evaluating the text through the methodological standards of the field. For the purposes of our course, Wrong Women would not qualify as an oral history text, because its sources, structure, and evidence do not align with the defining principles of oral history practice.  I felt the need to add this note because what follows is an analysis of what Wrong Women is not, but not a critique of what West ever claimed it to be.

Caroline West’s Wrong Women: Selling Sex in Monto, Dublin’s Forgotten Red Light District (2025) announces itself as an act of recovery. “Beyond the simple binary of exploitation and empowerment, this book is a study into the history of the unrecognized, the voice that other people would prefer not to hear, and the spectrum of violence against women, particularly marginalized women” (West, 2025, p. 6).  Yet from its opening pages, the book exposes a central contradiction: it declares that it “draws” on oral history, but its actual reference to oral testimony is limited if what’s included can be deemed oral history at all. The women who populate West’s pages—sex workers, former laundry inmates, street children, madams and social reformers—died long before recording technology, and their “words” survive only as hearsay relayed through their descendants, barely any of whom know of the Monto at its peak – from 1860-1925.  What emerges, then, is not oral history in the methodological sense taught by Ritchie (2014), Sommer and Quinlan (2024), or Perkiss (2022), but rather a hybrid of archival research, social commentary, and empathetic speculation.

Monto was once reputed to be the largest red-light district in Europe. West aims to restore its women to historical visibility. “The women of…Monto have shaped the course of history. But we have learned from them without acknowledging them” (West, 2025, p. 265).  Her ambition—to retrieve agency and voice from stigma—is both feminist and urgent. West (2025) acknowledges: “While we can’t directly interview the women and girls of Monto, this book strives to promote their voices as much as possible and support them with the voices of their descendants” (p. 7).  This acknowledgement hints at the methodological slippage that follows.

One of the most striking weaknesses of Wrong Women is its sourcing. As a student of oral history, I have learned that transparency about one’s sources—who was interviewed, when, how, and under what conditions—is an ethical cornerstone of the field. Yet Caroline West’s book provides no way for the reader to verify or trace the origins of her material. There are no citations, reference notes, or interview transcripts of any kind. Instead, West includes just a page and a quarter titled “Further Reading,” listing twenty-one general works. At the bottom of that page she writes, “For a full bibliography and reference list, please visit www.iamcarolinewest.com.” When I navigated to that site, however, I found only a dead link: “Website Expired. This account has expired. If you are the site owner, click below to login.” For a book that claims to draw on oral interviews, this absence of verifiable documentation is troubling. It prevents readers and researchers from checking context, assessing reliability, or even confirming that the interviews occurred in the form implied.

West does identify several individuals as sources, but their relationship to the Monto era (roughly 1860–1925) is tenuous at best. She cites “a great-great-granddaughter and a great-granddaughter of madam Annie Meehan…who grew up hearing whispers and snippets about what her grant-granny had been up to” (West, 2025, p. 7).   Another informant is “a great-grandson to madam and convicted murderer Margaret Carroll” (West, 2025, p. 7).  Martin Coffey is the author of a book called What’s Your Name Again? “He has sifted through his family history to discover how their connections to Monto have shaped his family since Margaret was convicted” (West, 2025, p. 7). A third source, folklorist Terry Fagan, recorded stories from elderly Monto residents decades after the district’s closure; West writes that “through his interviews, we can hear a visceral account of life in the tenements” (West, 2025, p. 8).  She also mentions “women working in the sex trade today,” interviewed at a 2023 banner-making event for the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, as well as “thoughts from journalist Sarah McInerney,” who covers contemporary violence against women in sex work (West, 2025, p.8).

Finally, West (2025) summarizes her method this way: “The stories from my interviews [with the aforementioned people] are woven through medical records, memories of local residents, official documents, academic theories, folklore, scraps of words and sentences, and the experiences of those in similar situations at the same time as Monto’s existence” (p. 10).  Taken together, these statements show that none of West’s informants possess firsthand memory of Monto itself. What we have instead is a chain of mediated recollections—descendants repeating “whispers and snippets,” contemporary sex workers reflecting on parallels, and a folklorist recalling what others once told him. Each of these layers introduces distance, interpretation, and hearsay. From an oral-history perspective, that matters: as Sommer and Quinlan (2024) emphasize, oral history depends not just on words spoken, but on the documented interaction between interviewer and narrator—the conditions under which memory is recorded, preserved, and contextualized. Without transcripts, dates, or audio files, West’s “voices” remain untraceable.

Throughout Wrong Women, West employs the rhetoric of orality without the practice of oral history. Chapter 19 mourns all that we do not know about the women of Monto:

We don’t know about the woman’s inner lives, their sense of self or self sense of humor. Who were they beyond the label of ‘poor unfortunate’?… How much power and choice they had in their day-to-day lives? How did they understand sexual violence, power dynamics, consent, pleasure, pregnancy and contraception?…How did they think about their experiences [in Monto]?  We don’t have…enough information on how the women of Monto responded to [the] stigma [that accompanied being a sex worker] (West, 2025, p. 281).

This passage epitomizes the book’s paradox. The women’s experiences, then, are speculated, not recorded. If oral history is defined by the process of interviewing and recording the memories of living individuals who consent to share their experience within a relationship of trust, then to imagine what someone might have experienced or might have reacted is a literary gesture, not a methodological one. West’s empathy is palpable, but her practice collapses the distinction between reconstructing and hearing.

To her credit, West acknowledges this gap.  There are no or very few records and actual accounts from Monto, so West repeatedly uses examples from brothels in New Orleans, San Francisco, Paris, London, and Australia for comparison and to extrapolate what conditions in Monto may have been.  West quotes a recollection reflection from a man about how his grandmother

…could have felt living in these conditions after moving to Dublin to reunite with her mother after growing up separately from her in Tipperary. ‘The tenement houses in the area where her mother lived out her life must have been very strange indeed for this young country woman, with the smell of boiled cabbage, bodies washed and unwashed, hallways marked with years of blood, sweat and tears, stairways drenched and stained from all sorts of human waste that was carried out in buckets to the one and only toilet in the backyard. Did she perhaps, at any time, long for the fresh clean air of Thomastown in county Tipperari?’ (West, 2025, p. 72).

Such passages reveal the book’s distance from oral history.  Oral history does not imagine what someone must have felt; it records what someone remembers feeling.  West generates intimacy through empathetic conjecture, not through a reciprocal exchange that defines oral history.

West yearns for evidence of a “guidebook” (a/k/a a “blue book”) for Monto’s red-light district (though she has found no such primary source yet).  “While these guides proliferated across the British Empire, we must ask – was there a blue book for Monto?” The author cites to several print and stationary shops in the vicinity of Monto on Sackville St. She then speculates “if [the printers] could make money on the side it was surely an opportunity not to be ignored, and they may also have been the ones to print the business cards that the madams gave to sailors. It is not a stretch to think the madams saw the value of this form of communication [newspapers]” (West, 2025, p.87, emphasis added).

Chapter 6 continues with this wishful thinking: “Perhaps one day a scrap of paper will be unearthed in an old dockyard halfway across the world with the names of Monto’s inhabitants and their specialties splashed across it” (West, 2025, p. 88).  There was evidence that a printer named Bartholomew had been invited to a masquerade ball by “the queen of the red-light scene in Dublin.” Based on this invitation and no other cited evidence, West (2025) writes “Bartholomew was clearly comfortable with the sex trade and happy to do favors for his favorite Madame” (p. 87).  Other powerful people in the printing business and distribution business had been invited to that same masquerade ball, from which West speculates: “these party guests show a connection between people with power in the printing and distribution businesses and those in the sex trade, making a blue book of some kind a real possibility” (p. 88).  Finally, citing no one, she concludes: “most likely, if such books did exist, they perished on their onward journeys or were deliberately destroyed by vigilantes or reformers” (West, 2025, p. 89). 

Just because Wrong Women may not qualify as an oral history, I don’t mean to detract from the diligence of West’s use of archival fragments.  She draws on the Irish census data from 1861-1911, the Irish Times, the Legion of Mary ledgers, and court records. Her archival skill is impressive, yet the “voices” that West brings the read are actually textual inferences, rather than records (and certainly not recordings). To paraphrase Ritchie (2014), a historian’s interpretation of a written document cannot substitute for the narrator’s own telling.  West’s method collapses that distinction, treating what texts that do exist as equivalent to oral presence. The result is evocative prose but unstable epistemology.

Another reason Wrong Women cannot be considered an oral history is because West (2025) strives to “promote their voices [of the women and girls of Monto]” (p. 7). The intention is admirable, but the phrase reveals an ethical pitfall. To “promote” implies that the historian possesses the authority to bestow voice—a gesture oral historians have worked to undo. For Ritchie (2014), oral history is not necessarily the historian advocating for others but listening with them. West’s method reverses that relation: she becomes the narrator of reconstructed memory.  Perkiss’s 2022 Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore offers a counterexample. Perkiss builds her narrative around recorded interviews, foregrounding the interview process itself—the awkward pauses, the contradictions, the emotions that mark trauma in real time. Through no “fault” of West’s, a narrative of that sort is not possible for the women of Monto.  West’s would-be narrators are long-since deceased; thus, her interventions cannot be checked against lived memory or consent. The result is a valiant effort to restore voice that simultaneously replaces it.

Why, then, does the Wrong Women claim to draw upon oral history? The cynic in me (perhaps still under the influence of Abby Perkiss’s disillusionment) thinks it’s partly marketing. “Oral history” now connotes intimacy and authenticity, qualities that publishers value in popular nonfiction. West herself may genuinely see her empathetic reconstructions as a kind of surrogate orality—a way of “listening across time.” Yet Ritchie (2014) would warn us not to call a monologue an oral history; doing so, erases the dialogic foundation on which the field of oral history is built.  The issue is not pedantry but ethics: when a historian adopts the label of oral history, readers may mistake well-researched hypotheses for testimony.

**From here to the next set of asterisks is more of a book review and not so much a critique of West’s oral history (or lack thereof).  You can skip to the conclusion if you only want my take on why this wasn’t an oral history.

Wrong Women, however, in its own right, still contributes meaningfully to feminist historiography. West dismantles the moral narratives that cast Monto’s women as either victims or sinners. Chapter 1 highlights the economic structures that made sex work a survival strategy.  Chapter 11 situates Monto’s Westmoreland Locke hospital within the continuum of coercive societal control of women (and not just the “wrong women”). This chapter explores how syphilis was feminized and how women working as prostitutes were blamed for being transmitters, but not the men who infected them. Though the “Lock” in Monto was not subject to Ireland’s Contagious Diseases Act (unfortunately, West never tells us why), “shaming” the “unfortunates” who sought treatment there abounded:

To compound the harm caused by being targeted by police and detained, the women were then accused of enjoying the examination so much that they had become addicted to the speculum, reduced to being labeled as ‘uterine hypochondriacs’ who craved the exam, and this belief was spread in the pages of influential medical journals (West, 2025, p. 154).

(A discerning reader would have appreciated a citation to or quote from one of those influential medical journals, but alas….)

West also exposes the patriarchal logic that underpinned both the penal and medical systems of her period, showing how women’s suffering was reframed as benevolence. When authorities deemed the institutionalization or incapacitation of women selling sex as a “humane act being done to her” (West, 2025, p. 150), West makes clear that such interventions were not protective but punitive, rooted in a moral hierarchy that pathologized female sexuality. Chapter 14, “Policing the Body,” feels all too familiar in light of modern patterns of sexual violence and victim-blaming. West quotes the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s medical officers, who claimed that when policemen contracted venereal disease, it was not their fault: they were “innocent rural young men who were not used to the vices of a big city, and finding themselves surrounded on their beats with vice and infamy, under many attractive forms, they were probably unable to restrain themselves from the influences brought to bear upon them” (West, 2025, p. 189). The rationalization—that men’s transgressions are the inevitable result of women’s temptation—echoes disturbingly in contemporary defenses of sexual assault by privileged young men, such as Brock Turner, whose crimes were reframed as youthful lapses rather than acts of violence. West’s historical material thus reveals the deep continuity of patriarchal narratives that excuse men and criminalize or medicalize women’s bodies.

Chapter 15 discusses the violence experienced by women in the sex trade – both in Monto and in modern society – and how the media alternates between voyeurism and moral panic.  This reveals the patriarchal surveillance shaping Ireland’s modern identity. In these sections, West’s voice is critical rather than speculative, and the book’s historical argument is strongest.  “The path forward for ethical reporting lies in understanding how the stereotype of the wrong woman has survived since Monto and is still played out today across the pages and views of modern media” (West, 2025, p. 217). 

In its final chapters, Wrong Women moves from exposing systemic injustice to honoring the resilience and mutual care of the women of Monto. Chapter 17, “Disrupters,” celebrates the informal networks of dignity, protection, and resistance that these women built for one another. West (2025) argues that reformers such as Frank Duff “may have received the accolades for being the one to end Monto, but he did so by standing on the shoulders of women” (p. 235). She urges readers to “reflect on the loss of knowledge of the actions of those we will never know, such as the efforts from those in the trade themselves and working-class women” (West, 2025, p. 235). For me, this chapter feels like the emotional heart of the book: it restores a sense of agency to women who have otherwise appeared in history as victims or statistics.

West includes a particularly affecting oral recollection preserved by folklorist Terry Fagan. A man recalls that “when my mother’s granny died in 1917, the priest refused to come and give her last rites… someone on my father’s side made a cross to go over that woman’s bed.… When she died it was loaned out to other families who had prostitutes who had a priest that wouldn’t come to.… I loaned it to Terry Fagan’s Museum, and I gave him the story” (West, 2025, p. 240). This story of the handmade “Monto cross,” passed among families denied priestly blessing, becomes a powerful emblem of community care — women and families creating their own rituals of dignity when the Church refused them any.

Throughout the chapter, West provides examples of agency and rebellion: women choosing prison over the laundries because “they knew they would never get out,” refusing the uniform of the workhouse, changing their names to evade authorities, renaming the brothel district “the village,” and even smuggling weapons to Irish revolutionaries. She reframes such acts not as criminality but as survival — “an act of survival rather than one of callous abandonment” (West, 2025, p. 250). West also bridges past and present, noting the continuation of solidarity through groups like the Sex Workers Opera, the Red Umbrella Film Festival, and the Ugly Mugs Initiative. These examples position sex workers not as passive subjects of rescue but as active agents of mutual aid and political voice.

There is, however, a bittersweet moment at the chapter’s close, when West describes a confrontation between a priest and a notorious madam during the closure of Monto: “Eventually the priest lost his cool with her and shouted her into submission.… Sadly, we will never know what May said to them or what exactly was so powerful about the priest’s speech that took the wind out of her sails.… Duff, through his lack of note taking, ensured they are lost to history” (West, 2025, p. 261). West’s lament here underscores the archival silences that oral history seeks to fill — and the tragedy of record-keepers (in this case, a male record-keeper) deciding which voices survive.

In Chapter 18, “Ethical Remembrance,” West turns explicitly to the question of how these women should be remembered. “The women of the Lock and Monto have shaped the course of history. But we have learned from them without acknowledging them” (West, 2025, p. 265). She identifies this forgotten activism as “the beginning of organized feminism in Ireland,” (p. 266) linking the women’s lived struggle for bodily autonomy and survival to later campaigns for suffrage and social reform. Her proposed framework of Machnamh — “a compassionate concept [in Irish]… meaning reflection, meditation, thought, and contemplation, allowing for a multitude of narratives to be heard and for remembrance to be thoughtful and ethical” (p. 267) — offers a culturally rooted model of remembering that resonates deeply with oral-history ethics.

West distinguishes between mere memorialization and what she calls “honoring the outcast” (p. 271). West (2025) writes, “The difference is the honoring, as opposed to just creating a physical space. The difference between remembering and memorializing is that in remembering we put them back together again.… We turn them into people. We remember that they are people with lives and they’re not just a massive scrabbling misery” (p. 271). This distinction captures the same ethical impulse that oral historians emphasize: the act of remembrance as re-humanization, not spectacle. West concludes that “ethical remembrance needs to be conscious of not retraumatizing those sharing their stories” (p. 275).  This recalls Abrams’s (2016) trauma-informed approach to oral history practice.  West concludes with praise for folklorist Terry Fagan’s recorded interviews: “to hear their history, in their own words, accents and tone, is not only a democratic way to learn, but also an ethical one that centers the people themselves” (West, 2025, p. 280).

Together, these final chapters point toward what Wrong Women could have been if its oral sources had been more fully available: a true act of Machnamh, a reflective listening that dignifies the speakers rather than speaking for them. For readers trained in oral history, these chapters are both inspiring and instructive. They remind us that empowerment is not only in retelling the past, but in building the ethical frameworks that ensure every retelling honors the people whose lives make it possible.

**

Wrong Women: Selling Sex in Monto, Dublin’s Forgotten Red Light District is a vivid, compassionate, and rigorously researched account of an overlooked world. Yet it is not an oral history. Its “voices” are reconstructions; its evidence, archival; its empathy, authorial. To label it oral history is to mistake the presence of voice for the practice of listening.

Reading Wrong Women after studying oral-history methodology changed how I interpret historical writing that claims to “promote voice.” Before this course, I might have accepted West’s narrative empathy as oral history by another name. Now I see the difference between writing about silenced people and listening to them. In Ritchie’s 2014 framework, oral history redistributes authority; in Perkiss’s (2022), it preserves the raw texture of experience; in Sommer and Quinlan’s (2024), it documents context as carefully as content. West’s book, though powerful, remains bound by the author’s interpretive voice.

At the same time, Wrong Women demonstrates why scholars and students are drawn to oral-history language even when true interviews are impossible. The hunger for voice—for proximity to lives erased by shame or time—is real. West’s impulse to “hear” these women is not wrong; it is simply not oral history. Her work inhabits what we might call a historiography of empathy: a form that borrows oral history’s moral energy but translates it into imaginative narrative. Recognizing that distinction allows us to appreciate her important research without confusing it for oral method.

West’s book reminds us students of oral history that the discipline’s strength lies not in eloquence but in relationship—between interviewer and narrator, memory and record, consent and interpretation. West succeeds in restoring dignity to Monto’s women, even if that restoration does not take oral history’s collaborative form. In doing so, she leaves us with a valuable paradox: a book that makes us want to listen more carefully, even if the actual voices of Monto’s women may forever be out of reach.

Works Referenced

Abrams, L. (2016). Oral history theory, second edition. Routledge.

Perkiss, A. (2022) Hurricane Sandy: On New Jersey’s forgotten shore.  Cornell University Press.

Ritchie, D. A. (2014). Doing oral history. Oxford University Press.

Sommer, B. & Quinlan, M.K. (2024). The oral history manual, fourth edition. Rowman & Littlefield.

West, C. (2025). Wrong women: Selling sex in Monto, Dublin’s forgotten red-light district.  Eriu Books. 

1. Methodology and Practice

• In Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore, you were collecting oral histories while the community was still processing the disaster. How did doing oral history “in real time” change your approach compared to more retrospective projects?
• How did you decide what counted as “enough” voices or representation for the project? Were there moments when you had to balance breadth versus depth in your interviews?

2. Ethics and Power

• Oral historians often talk about “shared authority,” but in post-disaster contexts the power dynamics can be particularly sensitive. How did you navigate that with your narrators—especially if/when their experiences or needs conflicted with your goals as a researcher?
• Did any of your interviewees later express discomfort or change their perspective on being included in the project? If so, how did you handle that?

3. Emotion and Empathy in Fieldwork

• Oral history requires both empathy and distance. How did you care for yourself emotionally while listening to stories of trauma and loss, and how did you maintain the trust of your narrators through that process?
• If you (or any of your students) had experienced loss from Sandy, do you feel you were “objective enough” to endeavor upon oral history interviews so soon after the storm?

4. Public History and Impact

• Your project is both a book and a digital archive. Who was your intended audience while designing the project?
• Looking back, do you see the Hurricane Sandy project as an act of scholarship, community service, or activism—or all three?

5. Lessons for Emerging Oral Historians

• What’s something you wish you’d known before starting Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore—a challenge that doesn’t get mentioned in oral history manuals but feels essential to the work?
• How do you advise students to balance fidelity to oral history best practices with the improvisation that fieldwork sometimes demands?

Reading Abby Perkiss’s Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore alongside The Oral History Manual by Barbara Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan and Donald Ritchie’s Doing Oral History has made me think deeply about the delicate intersections of memory, trauma, and ethics in oral history work. I was especially struck by the fact that Perkiss and her students began interviewing residents of New Jersey’s Bayshore only a few months after Hurricane Sandy—while people were still displaced, still negotiating insurance claims, and still trying to make sense of what had happened.

That immediacy makes Hurricane Sandy unlike any oral history project I’ve encountered so far. Usually, oral historians record memories long after events have passed (as in Swing Shift, nearly half a century after WWII), when time has softened the edges of experience and narrative coherence (or reconstruction or influence) has started to take shape. Perkiss’s project, by contrast, captures stories that were still unfolding. The narrators were not reflecting from a distance; they were speaking from inside the disaster.

This raises difficult and fascinating ethical questions. Is it too soon to ask survivors to relive painful experiences when the losses are still fresh? How do we ensure informed consent when participants are grieving, exhausted, or overwhelmed by bureaucratic systems? Sommer and Quinlan’s “life cycle” model of oral history emphasizes careful preparation, emotional safety, and respect for narrators’ boundaries. Their guidelines are designed precisely for situations like this—when an interview has the potential not only to document trauma but to retrigger it.

I found myself reading Perkiss’s work through the lens of my own prior professional experience interviewing and examining witnesses who had recently survived traumatic events—sometimes weeks, days, or even hours before our first interview. Those conversations required an intense mix of empathy, patience, and ethical restraint, and frankly, they inflicted an unhealthy dose of vicarious trauma, too. I had to earn trust, create space for emotion, and still maintain enough structure to do my job responsibly and ethically – trial work is, after all, a “truth-seeking” function (my notion of “truth” has certainly been redefined after nearly eight years removed from trial work). I recognize that same balance in oral history practice. Perkiss and her students weren’t “investigating,” but they were doing something similarly delicate: listening to people in the midst of pain, asking them to give shape to experiences that might still feel ungraspable to them and unrelatable to those who hadn’t been through the same.

Sommer and Quinlan, as well as Ritchie, both remind us that oral history isn’t just about collecting facts—it’s about building relationships. Ritchie, in particular, stresses that memory is never static or fully reliable, and that’s part of the point. Especially after trauma, memory becomes fluid: it shifts, contradicts itself, and sometimes resists coherence altogether. Perkiss’s narrators often speak in fragments or loops, moving between disbelief and determination. From a strictly factual perspective, these accounts might seem inconsistent. But from a human perspective, they’re profoundly truthful. They show how people experience and process trauma as it unfolds.

That’s what makes Perkiss’s project so ethically and emotionally compelling. The interviews were conducted not by outsiders parachuting in, but by students from the same state—people who shared a sense of loss, vulnerability, and commitment to documenting what mainstream media largely ignored and how marginalized certain Sandy survivors became in the wake of the storm. In that sense, the Sandy project feels less like extraction and more like collective witnessing. It preserves stories that might otherwise have been lost or never made visible, while also giving residents the chance to define their own narratives.

As I read, I kept returning to Ritchie’s idea that oral historians must balance empathy with professionalism. They are not therapists, but they are custodians of deeply personal truths. The simple act of being listened to—of having one’s story recorded with care and respect—can itself be a kind of validation, even a step toward healing. I’ve seen versions of that dynamic myself, sitting across from witnesses who just needed someone to hear them. Oral history, like testimony, can transform private pain into public acknowledgment, if not understanding.

These readings have also challenged me to reconsider what “accuracy” means in oral history. When trauma is fresh, memory is unstable—but instability doesn’t make it unreliable. Instead, it reveals the emotional truth of lived experience. Oral history’s task isn’t to correct that instability but to document it—to show how people remember, reinterpret, and assign meaning to events in the moment.

Ultimately, I see these three works as part of a continuum. Sommer and Quinlan offer the structure—the ethical scaffolding that keeps oral history safe and sustainable. Ritchie brings in the human side—the craft of listening and the humility of interpretation. And Perkiss shows what happens when those principles are tested in the real world, amid loss and uncertainty. Together, they remind me that oral history is both an ethical responsibility and an act of empathy. It requires structure and sensitivity, rigor and compassion.

When I think about Perkiss and her students recording those interviews in the cold winter months after Sandy, I see oral history not just as documentation but as a form of care—an attempt to hold space for stories before they harden into history. And that, to me, is one of the most powerful acts there can be of ethics and empathy.

When I teach my students about the importance of deliberate word choice in questioning witnesses, I often begin with the Loftus and Palmer (1974) experiment on reconstructive memory. Participants watched car-crash videos and were asked to estimate the vehicles’ speed. Those who were asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other reported an average of 40.8 mph, compared to 34.0 mph for hit and 30.8 mph for contacted. More tellingly, the smashed group was more than twice as likely to remember broken glass on the road—glass that never existed. A single verb altered not only the witness’s perception of speed but their entire recollection of reality.

I use that example to illustrate how easily language can shape memory, but reading Lynn Abrams’ Oral History Theory gave me a new vocabulary for why this happens. Abrams describes memory as reconstructive rather than reproductive: each act of remembering is a negotiation between the narrator’s inner world and the cues provided by the listener. In both oral history and the courtroom, the listener—the interviewer, the lawyer, the judge—plays an active, constitutive role in the story that emerges. Abrams’ insistence that “the interview is a shared performance” could just as easily appear in a trial-advocacy manual.

What struck me most is how Abrams situates the interviewer within the moral and emotional texture of the exchange. She writes about intersubjectivity—the mutual influence that shapes both question and answer. Lawyers, too, must attend to that dynamic, especially in trauma-informed or culturally competent practice. I’ve seen witnesses from high power-distance or collectivist cultures avoid direct answers, not out of evasion but out of respect. I’ve seen survivors of violence tell their stories in fragments because linearity is impossible after trauma. Abrams’ framework reminds me that listening ethically means recognizing the cultural and emotional scaffolding around every utterance.

Her treatment of performance also resonated deeply. Every interview, she argues, is a performance staged within social expectations—of gender, class, race, and power. In court, credibility is similarly performative. When judges instruct juries on how to evaluate a witness, they list factors like the depth of detail, the witness’s demeanor, any motive to fabricate, and the “ring of truth.” But all of those criteria are interpretive; they rely on cultural assumptions about what sincerity looks and sounds like. Andy Taslitz’s work, Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom, describes how Black women often feel compelled to modulate tone, diction, or posture to appear credible to predominantly white juries. Abrams’ notion that narrators seek composure—to reconcile their private selves with public expectations—maps precisely onto that struggle.

I also found myself reflecting on Abrams’ warnings about the emotional cost of bearing witness. She writes of vicarious trauma and the ethical duty to acknowledge the interviewer’s own vulnerability. Lawyers rarely speak in those terms, but we experience it constantly: listening to clients recount assault, loss, or systemic injustice. The professional demand to remain detached can mask the fact that listening is labor. Abrams reframes that labor as a moral practice—one that requires reflexivity, empathy, and boundaries. Those are precisely the skills I hope my students carry into their own encounters with clients and witnesses.

Perhaps most powerfully, Abrams dismantles the myth of objectivity that still haunts both historians and lawyers. She argues that oral history is not about retrieving pure facts but about constructing meaning through relationship. The same could be said of advocacy. Before a witness ever takes the stand, an attorney must evaluate credibility through an interpretive lens: weighing corroboration, motive, demeanor, and narrative coherence. Then the fact-finder repeats that interpretive act in deliberation. What Abrams calls the “co-creation of knowledge” happens in court every day; it’s just that lawyers rarely admit it.

Reading Oral History Theory made me realize that law and oral history share a fundamental faith in the power of story—not as decoration to facts, but as the structure through which facts gain significance. Abrams’ insistence on listening, empathy, and self-awareness turns what could have been a technical manual into an ethical guidebook. It teaches that truth is never a fixed object waiting to be extracted, but a collaborative act of meaning-making between speaker and listener. For me, that lesson reframes what it means to be an advocate. To question a witness is not simply to test memory; it is to participate in the fragile, creative process of constructing truth. Abrams reminds me that every word—whether hit, smashed, or contacted—has the power to alter the landscape of memory itself. As both historians and lawyers, we are custodians of that power, and our task is not only to persuade but to listen with rigor, humility, and care.

My father taught high school history for thirty-seven years. He taught, as he used to say, “the book.” He loved history and wanted his students to love it too, but he often lamented that they didn’t share his zeal. In hindsight, his frustration highlights an important lesson for all historians and teachers: it is not enough to present knowledge from the top down. We must meet our students, communities, and co-authors where they are. History — like teaching — has to resonate with the lived situations of its audiences in order to matter.

This lesson is at the heart of Michael Frisch’s ongoing work on shared authority. In his early collection A Shared Authority (1990), Frisch emphasized that oral history produces unique documents precisely because “both source and subject are involved in generating and interpreting the data” (p. 226). Authority, in other words, is already distributed. More recently, in From a Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen and Back (2020), Frisch sharpened the distinction: sharing authority implies that scholars own it and may choose to distribute it, while a shared authority recognizes that meaning-making “is in fact shared by definition—it is inherent in the dialogic nature of an interview, and in how audiences receive and respond to exhibitions and public history interchanges in general” (Frisch, 2020, p. 127).

This framing resonates with my position as a practice professor in a law school, where “experience” is often treated as distinct from (ahem…even lesser than) “expertise.” Frisch’s work insists that this is a false dichotomy. As he puts it, we must recognize “the already shared authority in the documents we generate and in the processes of public history engagement—a dialogic dimension, however implicit, through which ‘author-ship’ is shared by definition, and hence interpretive ‘author-ity’ as well” (Frisch, 2020, p. 128). My colleague Rachel López’s “Participatory Law Scholarship” similarly challenges the hierarchy between professional knowledge and lived knowledge, inviting those who have experienced law’s injustice to co-author scholarship. Such models remind us that lived experience is not supplementary to expertise but constitutive of it.

Frisch’s attention to the possibilities of digitization underscores how the structures of access themselves shape authority. He describes the historical distinction between the “raw” (the unmediated recordings of oral histories) and the “cooked” (the curated, edited interpretations published for academic or public consumption) (2020). Digital content management, he argues, creates an “in-between” space: “These new modes of access make the raw collection a legible and explorable hub, and in so doing make the framing and fabrication of usable cooked products more dispersed as a capacity and more open-ended, fluid, and continuous as a process” (Frisch, 2020, p. 130). This “post-documentary sensibility” creates “more open-ended, less linear, and hence a more sharable space” (Frisch, 2020, p. 130).

Yet, even digital access is constrained. Search tools, Frisch warns, are funnels — they demand that users know what they are looking for in advance. What is lost is the possibility of stumbling across new insights by accident. As he notes, “dutiful provision of answers can only be as good as the questions” (Frisch, 2020, p. 132). This recalls Chris Matthews’s lament (as a panelist on Meet the Press more than a decade ago) that the shift from print to digital newspapers deprives readers of the serendipity of flipping pages, of “happening upon” what they did not know they wanted to know. For oral history, the challenge is how to design archives that allow for wandering, exploration, and discovery, rather than simply retrieval.

The stakes of these questions are not new. In their proposal for Philadelphia’s 1982 tercentennial celebration, Frisch and his colleagues envisioned interactive programming that would allow residents to discover and interpret their own urban history (Frisch, 1990). They hoped to produce “not a more controlled and formulaic presentation but one open to genuine interaction, playful spontaneity, and substantive shaping by the people of Philadelphia themselves” (Frisch, 1990, p. 229). The National Endowment for the Humanities rejected the idea, claiming a street festival was “not a serious locale for historical presentation” (Frisch, 1990, p. 233). In the end, the project was pared down — “dumbed down,” my phrasing, not Frisch’s — and stripped of its most radical potential. Yet participants consistently found the interactive elements most engaging, demonstrating that “interpretation could be an active and shared process and that the very ‘author-ity’ of historical understanding could in this way be a self-discovered and self-generated public resource in an urban community” (Frisch, 1990, p. 238).

These lessons remain pressing. Whether in oral history, legal scholarship, or classroom teaching, the point is not merely to share authority as an act of generosity, but to recognize authority as already shared. The challenge, as Frisch insists, is to design archives, classrooms, and institutions that acknowledge and sustain that dialogic fact. My father’s frustration that his students did not love history as much as he did was perhaps misplaced. The question is not whether students bring zeal to the book, but whether teachers — and scholars — are willing to bring the book, the archive, or the case file into conversation with students’ own lived worlds. Only then can history feel like it belongs to them.

In jazz, the term “big ears” refers to the ability to hear and make meaning out of complex music. One needs “big ears” to make sense of improvisatory negotiations of tricky changes and multiple  simultaneous lines and rhythms. “Big ears” are needed to hear dissonances and silences. They are needed to follow nuanced conversations between soloists; between soloists and rhythm sections; between music and other social realms; between multiply situated performers and audiences and institutions; and between the jazz at hand and jazz in history. If jazz was just about hitting the right notes, surviving the chord changes, and letting out the stops, jazz scholars, listeners, and even musicians would not need “big ears.”

…There are some areas in which meticulous historical work in jazz studies has managed to unsettle ideological understandings of jazz historiography. Much of this has involved locating jazz discourse in a history of primitivism, or in European and European American fantasies of exotic otherness, while documenting “lost” jazz practices that did not fit, and therefore do not appear, in dominant discourse. This type of scholarship…is not just about dueling canons, but about taking the canon apart to see what makes it tick, then trying to craft a different kind of historical narrative that contextualizes this ticking, along with other social, cultural, and political frameworks through which jazz has mattered. This work [is] important, not only because it will give us a more complete understanding of jazz history as a distinct narrative, but because it will increase our understandings of the societies for whom jazz has been meaningful.

Sherrie Tucker (2002)

Students of oral, labor, cultural, and sexual history should learn to “grow” their ears as well. 

Feminist oral history is never just about “getting the story.” It’s about recognizing how power, positionality, and voice shape what gets told, how it is told, and what remains unsaid. Sherrie Tucker’s approach to oral history in Swing Shift (2000) and “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” (2002) models what feminist researchers describe as listening differently: treating silences and refusals not as gaps to be fixed, but as knowledge in their own right.  Tucker leans into her narrators’ contradictions rather than smoothing them over:  when accounts conflict or resist neat categorization, these moments reveal the multiple and often competing ways that people construct meaning about their lives.  Instead of writing this off as this as a flaw in oral history, Tucker treats it as one of its strengths. 

Likewise, Tucker refuses to erase the “messiness” of memory. In Swing Shift, women musicians at times recalled the same incidents in very different ways: for instance, one remembered racial tension on the road, while another described the same tour as harmonious. Rather than deciding which account was “accurate,” Tucker shows how memory itself is shaped by identity, later experience, and the politics of telling. This aligns with Alessandro Portelli’s (1991) argument that the value of oral history lies less in factual verification and more in the meanings attached to memory. For Tucker, memory’s contradictions are not a problem to solve but an opening to feminist interpretation.

Her chapter “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” takes this even further by questioning the assumption that researchers should always pursue disclosure — especially about sexuality. She notes that historians often enter interviews with the implicit desire that subjects will “finally” name themselves as queer, as if oral history’s objective is to uncover some ultimate truth. But what happens when narrators don’t? Tucker warns against the archival “closet,” where silence or ambiguity is read only as lacking data. Instead, she asks: what does it mean to respect refusal? To recognize that what is not said may reflect survival strategies, community norms, or simply the narrator’s right to privacy? This, too, is feminist practice: decentering the researcher’s expectations and honoring the autonomy of the narrator.

These methodological choices echo the principles set forth in Feminist Research Practice (2011), where oral history and focus groups are described as tools for amplifying marginalized voices in ways that challenge dominant narratives. The text emphasizes three commitments: awareness of power dynamics, ethical responsibility, and collaborative knowledge-making. Tucker embodies all three of these principles. She acknowledges her own positionality as a white feminist historian writing about women of color of an older generation; she resists imposing tidy conclusions that might overshadow narrators’ voices; and she considers the ethical stakes of how stories circulate in public memory.

What I find especially compelling is Tucker’s attention to silence as a form of data. She reminds us that narrators’ pauses, contradictions, or refusals to answer are not voids but more like productive absences that tell us something about historical context and lived experience. For instance, when some musicians avoided directly naming (what we’d consider today to be) sexual harassment they experienced on the road, Tucker doesn’t interpret that as denial. Instead, she highlights how gendered expectations of propriety shaped what women felt they could safely say in an interview, even decades later. This is feminist oral history at its sharpest: not extracting “confessions,” but situating speech within structures of power.

By weaving together oral testimony, archival fragments, and her own reflexive awareness, Tucker shows that feminist oral history is not only about recovering “lost” voices. It is about cultivating responsibility in how we listen, interpret, and represent. She reminds us that recovery without reflexivity risks exploitation — a kind of academic mining of marginalized lives. Listening differently, developing “big ears” (a term she adopted in a chapter penned two years after Swing Shift’s publication) means being accountable to the conditions under which people speak, and to the silences that accompany their words.

Tucker’s work reframes what counts as valuable historical knowledge. Feminist oral history is not simply additive — plugging women or queer people into existing narratives — but transformative, forcing us to rethink what kind of evidence matters. Silence matters. Contradiction matters. Ambiguity matters. And as Tucker demonstrates, honoring these dimensions is not methodological weakness but feminist rigor.

Tucker pushes oral history beyond recovery into responsibility. It’s not enough to surface marginalized voices if we then force them into neat categories that suit our pre-ordained frameworks. Feminist oral history, as Tucker practices it, insists on listening with humility, with ears big enough to hear the stories and the silences and the spaces in between.

Works Referenced

Hesse-Biber, S. N. & Leavy, PN. (2013). Feminist research practice: A primer. Sage Publications, Inc.

Portelli, A. (1991). What makes oral history different. In The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history. State University of New York Press.

Tucker, S. (2000). Swing shift: “All-girl” bands of the 1940s. Duke University Press.

Tucker, S. (2002). Big ears: Listening for gender in jazz studies. Current Musicology, 71-73 (Spring 2001-Spring 2002) pp. 375-376.

Tucker, S. (2002). When subjects don’t come out. Queer episodes in music and modern identity, 293-310.

When Octavia Leona Kohner showed up to contract negotiations in little more than “two flaps of fabric … attached by string,” she wasn’t just making a fashion choice. She was embodying the tension between workplace discipline and individual expression — and daring the management of Babeland, the famed New York City sex shop, to call her bluff.

The oral history of Octavia Leona Kohner, preserved in the NYC Trans Oral History Project[1] in partnership with the New York Public Library and the Digital Transgender Archive, offers a vivid case study of how oral history has evolved as a practice—from documenting elites to centering the voices of those historically pushed to the margins. Kohner, a transwoman who grew up on Staten Island, recounts her coming-of-age, her struggles with depression and suicidality, and her experiences as a labor organizer at New York City’s Babeland.

Interviewer Michelle Esther O’Brien spends 9 of 30 transcribed pages establishing Kohner’s life story, her traumas and relationships — which at first seemed unrelated to the unionization of Babeland’s employees, but actually positioned Kohner as the narrator of her own history. This aligns with Portelli’s (1991) argument that oral history is not just about facts but about meaning, memory, identity, and voice (in a pointed moment at the start of the interview, Kohner even “plays” with her voice, trying to determine if the mic would pick up her high-pitched, soft-spoken voice or if she should “go with” the more “bombastic” (i.e. deeper-pitched) voice we hear throughout the recording).  Kohner’s interview demonstrates the value of oral history not as a record of factual accuracy (Portelli, 1991), but as an illumination of how labor was lived and remembered by someone negotiating the intersections of gender, class, and work. 

Kohner’s account begins with her working-class childhood in Canarsie, where the cruelty of family and classmates foreshadows the resilience and tenacity she would later bring to her role as a labor organizer and self-described “agitator.”  Her organizing style is inseparable from her identity.  Kohner’s own decision-making (e.g. which voice to use), her subjectivity, and reflexivity shape the retrospective narration (Portelli, 1991; Sommer & Quinland, 2024).  In one section, Kohner discusses the “AEIOU”s of labor organizing: agitate, educate, inoculate, organize, unionize.  She reflects that she overdid it on agitating and should have put more energy into inoculating.[2]  Here, we see how oral history adds interpretive layers to labor history (Halpern, 1998).

O’Brien’s style also reflects the “art and science” of the oral history interview. (Sommer & Quinland, 2024, p. 4).  O’Brien gives Kohner space to narrate freely, asking open-ended questions that invite reflection rather than dictate it. The result is a narrative that feels collaborative rather than extractive, shaped by care and attentiveness. But, of course, oral history also reminds us that memory is produced in context—framed by the questions asked, the setting of the interview (here, the NYU Department of Sociology), the knowledge that the account will be archived, and the institutional framing (here, by the Trans Oral History Project).[3] 

In almost all ways, Kohner’s story stands as a direct rebuttal to the early vision of oral history articulated by Allan Nevins (1966) and Louis Starr (1977). For Nevins, oral history was born to preserve the recollections of “great men,” political leaders, and intellectual elites. Starr similarly associated the method with capturing authoritative accounts of public life. By contrast, Kohner’s narrative illustrates the democratization of oral history; Kohner’s is precisely an experience that Nevins’ traditional archives would have overlooked. This shift mirrors the broader trajectory of oral history’s role in recovering working-class perspectives (Halpern, 1998).   

Another poignant experience highlights both Kohner’s tactical acumen and Halpern’s (1998) appreciation for how oral history renders organizers’ creativity and their lived strategies: Babeland’s employees very intentionally threatened not to show up to work over Valentine’s Day weekend, the busiest shopping “season” in a sex shop. Kohner’s take-away: “hit them in the pocketbook and they will fold.” That threat to Babeland’s bottom dollar was ultimately what got the union recognized.  Lived human anecdotes and commentary like this complicate the official narratives of labor movements (Halpern, 1998).

And “complicated” is certainly one way to describe Octavia Kohner.  Toward the end of the interview, I found myself questioning her credibility somewhat.  She claims that she’s been retaliated against since the union contract went into effect, and this is something she’s arbitrating (through her union lawyer) with management. She relays that she’s been placed on probation after a poor customer service review on Yelp.  Her account left me wondering whether retaliation and legitimate critique can always be so neatly separated — especially for someone who embraces the mantle of “loudmouth agitator.”  But here, we see what makes oral history different: oral sources share their meaning with us, they don’t impart neutral fact (Portelli, 1991). So, maybe the “truth” isn’t whether Kohner deserved the Yelp review, but how she interprets and narrates [what she considers to be] retaliation.

While Kohner’s confidence in booty shorts is enviable for sure, the larger takeaway is that oral history expands labor history beyond contracts and strikes. It reveals the messy, embodied, sometimes unreliable, but deeply human side of organizing.

Works Referenced
Halpern, R. (1998). Oral history and labor history: A historiographic assessment after twenty-five years. The Journal of American History, 85(2), 596-610.

Nevins, A. (1966). Oral history: How and why it was born. In D. Dunaway & W. Baum (Eds.), Oral history: An interdisciplinary anthology (2nd Edition, pp. 29-38). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Portelli, A. (1991) What makes oral history different.In The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history (pp. 45-58). State University of New York Press.

Sommer, B. W., & Quinlan, M. K. (2024). Introduction to oral history.  In The oral history manual (pp. 1-10). Rowman & Littlefield.

Starr, L. (1977). Oral history.  In D. Dunaway & W. Baum (Eds.), Oral history: An interdisciplinary anthology (2nd Edition, pp. 39-61). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

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[1] https://nyctransoralhistory.org/interview/octavia-kohner/

[2] “Kohner: So I was really good at agitating, because I’m a very agitated person who is good at making other people feel agitated. I was good at educating, because I learned things the way that you are able to teach your co-workers, which is not through textbooks but by talking. And kind of sometimes I would skip the inoculate part, which wasn’t very good, which is essentially like, being like oh, they’re going to say this but really it’s this….And so I missed that part sometimes….And I would bring people to O a little bit too early.  I wouldn’t have felt them out enough where I didn’t agitate them enough or — I wasn’t very good at that part. I’ll admit it, I’m much better now….I was good at getting people agitated, who then other people could be like hi, you’re really agitated, do you want to meet [with leadership at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union]?”

[3] Another notable example of interview framing comes in the WPA Slave Narratives (1936) Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Administrative Files.

I made a career centered on arguing and deciding what counts as credible historical evidence. Just because evidence is subjective or partial doesn’t make it incredible.  Oral history’s subjectivity and partiality are often framed as weaknesses, but this week’s readings expound those traits as oral history’s distinctive strengths. Oral history does not pretend to provide a seamless, objective record of the past. Instead, it documents memory, interpretation, and meaning. That recognition helps us see oral history as not “less credible” but differently credible.

Nevins’s account highlights oral history’s roots in technology and journalism, and its growth into a practice that democratized history by capturing voices outside elite institutions. His reflections on the role of the interviewer also remind us that oral history is never a neutral record (is there really such a thing in the first place?). The interviewer arrives with preparation, biases, and strategies for eliciting certain responses, and then later shapes the narrative through transcription, editing, and presentation. Oral history therefore contains traces of both participants—the subject’s memories and the historian’s questions and interpretive choices. I found myself thinking about this when revisiting the WPA Slave Narratives. Those interviews do not stand apart from the context in which they were created: white interviewers in the 1930s trying to capture the stories of elderly African Americans. The transcription of dialect, often filtered through racist assumptions about what constituted “usual” speech, makes clear how much interviewer presence shaped the record.

Halpern’s discussion of oral history and labor history helped me situate oral history in relation to social change. I was struck by the idea that oral history was meant to recover the voices of working-class people and to empower them by involving them in writing their own histories. Yet, as Halpern shows, oral history in labor studies did not always live up to this promise because of methodological shortcomings and uneven integration with archival evidence. Still, the power of first-person testimony—especially when used in dialogue with written sources—illustrates how oral history complicates and enriches traditional historical narratives. I especially liked the idea of oral history as a “usable past,” a resource for ongoing struggles for justice.

Portelli’s essay was my favorite. His insistence that oral history tells us less about the bare facts of events and more about the meaning people attach to them was profound. I loved his observations about how transcription flattens spoken language. Tone, rhythm, and intonation carry social meaning that cannot easily be reduced to punctuation marks on a page. His point reminded me of the “My Cousin Vinny” example I use in teaching evidence: how a line transcribed with a period instead of a question mark can completely change its meaning. Reading Portelli also made me think about my mother’s experience being criticized for speaking her regional Italian dialect. Just as oral history resists being flattened into a uniform record, dialects resist being subsumed under the “proper” language. Both preserve the texture of lived experience “from below.”

Finally, looking at the WPA Slave Narratives with these insights made me more critical of what those documents tell us. They reveal not only the lives of formerly enslaved people but also how the interviewers chose to represent them. I wished I could hear those voices, not just read the transcripts, because the intonation and cadence would carry meaning the text alone cannot. At the same time, the handwritten notes/corrections and archival indexing remind me that oral history is never raw data—it is mediated, preserved, and structured in ways that reflect choices, biases, and incredible labor.

Oral history’s subjectivity is not a flaw to be corrected but a central feature to be embraced. It is precisely in its incompleteness, partiality, and dialogue between narrator and interviewer that oral history creates some of its most enduring truths.

September 1, 2025 – Happy Labor Day!

Engaging with Sommer and Quinlan alongside Richie underscored the complexity of oral history as both a methodology and a product, but also made clear how structured the practice has to be to qualify as oral history at all. Oral history is not simply recording memories or hosting conversations; it is the deliberate creation of primary sources within a framework that emphasizes preservation, accessibility, and reliability. Sommer and Quinlan’s “benchmarks” for the oral history cycle—conceptualization, planning, interviewing, preservation, and access—make it clear that oral history must be intentional and sustained. Without these steps, as they point out, one risks producing something anecdotal rather than something with long-term scholarly or community value.

Richie complicates this somewhat by highlighting the choices and interpretive work required of the oral historian. His discussion of paradoxes—particularly around memory—reminded me that oral history is not about pristine accuracy but about context, meaning, and perspective. Memory’s limitations are well known, but Richie’s examples of narrators who, even with memory loss, retain remarkable insight decades later forced me to consider memory as more nuanced than simply reliable or unreliable. This perspective recalled, for me, the jury instructions given in courts: credibility is judged not only by whether details are precise but also by whether testimony is consistent, plausible, and corroborated. In this way, memory in oral history can be both fragile and authoritative, depending on how it is framed and interpreted.

Another dimension that struck me is oral history’s power to challenge existing hierarchies of knowledge. Both Sommer and Quinlan, and Richie in particular, emphasize that oral history’s value lies in elevating voices otherwise left out of the archive. Richie’s point that the most illuminating insights may come not from those in positions of leadership but from employees or community members without formal authority complicates the assumption that “official” records provide the best evidence of the past. Oral history can correct misconceptions, supplement gaps, and re-center perspectives, producing histories that are more inclusive and, in many ways, more accurate to lived experience.

The organizational dossiers we read followed Sommer and Quinlan’s cycle of oral history work: they began with a clear research idea, developed a plan for gathering information, identified candidates for interviews, and drafted preliminary questions that would focus the conversation but that were broad enough not to stifle reflection and commentary.  I was especially struck by how the organizational histories presented institutions almost biographically, with traits, aspirations, challenges, and defining episodes. Reading them felt like encountering characters whose stories were far from static, they were animated, dynamic, and multi-voiced.

Taken together, the readings and dossiers suggest that oral history’s rigor derives as much from its methodology as from its interpretive choices. It requires attention to formality—release forms, preservation standards, archival planning—but it also demands reflexivity about the role of subjectivity and the responsibilities of the interviewer. In this sense, oral history is both disciplined and creative, situated between documentation and interpretation. What makes it compelling is precisely this dual nature: it insists on fidelity to process while simultaneously recognizing that memory and narrative are not fixed but negotiated. That balance itself gives oral history its particular strength as a historical method.

This is my eighth full academic year as a practice professor of law at Temple University Beasley School of Law, where I teach evidence, trial advocacy, and serve as the director of the LL.M. in Trial Advocacy program. About six years ago, I started researching gender bias in the courtroom for a presentation called Hysterical: Identifying and Eliminating Gendered Communication in the Practice of Law which I’ve given about 50 times all over the country. It’s become my passion project—equal parts love letter to women in the legal profession and tirade against the catch-22 we face: be too emotional, and you’re unprofessional; be dispassionate, and you’re a heartless bitch. The legal profession is slowly evolving, but I’m here to make sure we give it a good shove in the right direction.

Why this class?

Oral history feels like a natural extension of my scholarly and professional interests. Much of my work has involved the collection, preservation, and interpretation of testimony. In the courtroom, stories are structured and constrained by rules of evidence; in oral history, stories are expansive, layered, and contextualized within lived experience. I am especially interested in the ways oral history can surface voices that are often marginalized or silenced in official records—precisely the kinds of voices I sought to amplify as a prosecutor and now highlight in my research.

This course offers a chance to strengthen both the theoretical and methodological dimensions of my work. On the theoretical side, I am eager to study how oral histories complicate collective memory, power, and identity. On the practical side, I want to build skills in interviewing, transcription, and archiving—techniques that will allow me to capture narratives of women and gender-diverse lawyers as part of my eventual dissertation research. My goal is to document not only how these advocates navigate bias in the courtroom, but also how their personal experiences shape their advocacy styles, professional choices, and resilience.

Ultimately, I hope to bridge my legal expertise with the tools of communication scholarship. Oral history offers a methodology for preserving the lived realities of people whose voices are often minimized in institutional contexts. By learning to conduct and analyze oral histories with rigor, I can deepen my research, enrich my teaching, and contribute to a more inclusive understanding of how law is practiced and experienced.

Anything Else?

Where to begin? I’m married and have four kids (ages 13, 11, 9, and 4—a pandemic baby really keeps life spicy). I’m an only child, so I’m balancing parenting, a full-time job, and Ph.D. coursework with worrying about my aging parents, too. It’s a lot, but I thrive in chaos. Sleep? Overrated.

If there’s a day I seem scatterbrained, it’s probably because I’ve been up since 4:30 a.m. reviewing coursework while packing lunches, refereeing sibling squabbles, and heading into Philly traffic. But I’m here, caffeinated, and eager to learn.