Our focus will be on the ethical, methodological and theoretical challenges of documenting the power of testimony, and oral history, to shape public discourse and strengthen communities whose histories have been subjugated or silenced within dominant historical paradigms and media accounts. Within these parameters, we will explore the subjectivity of gendered, ethnic, cultural and other identity based narratives - particularly the ways in which these accounts subvert and correct public myth and memory. We will also probe the ways in which oral history, in its historical origins and its contemporary uses, is a radical form of testimony in which both collective and individual memory are preserved in texts, and other media, as social history and literary genre.

The application deadline is May 10, 2003.