Amy Starecheski - Incite at Columbia University

Amy Starecheski is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian whose research focuses on oral history as a social practice and the politics of history, value and property in cities. She is the Director of Columbia Oral History as well as the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University. She has served as President of the Oral History Association and in 2022 she received the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.

She has worked with Columbia Oral History since 1997. 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 2005-2008 she directed research and interviewing for the Atlantic Philanthropies Oral History Project, a global initiative which recorded 138 oral histories across four continents. She was Co-Director of the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Project, where she led a team of twenty interviewers doing longitudinal oral histories with 180 New Yorkers.

A longtime leader in the field of oral history education, she has been with OHMA since 2012 and holds an MA from Columbia Teachers College. She is co-author of the Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide, based on her work in NYC public schools after 9/11, and co-founded the Pedagogy of Listening Lab at Incite.

Her current project uses the Bronx as a laboratory for ethnographic and archival research about the production of historical knowledge, networks of historical practitioners, and how people decide what is true about the past. An engaged community researcher, 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, and directs the NEH-funded Mott Haven History Keepers Project, which supports grassroots historical workers.

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. 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.

Dr. Starecheski’s 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.