Graduate Oral History Intensive

Are you a PhD, Masters or Honours student about to start a research project using oral history – and need training to get you on the right track? Perhaps you’ve already started a graduate oral history project and want advice and support? You may be a historian, or you work in another social science or humanities discipline that uses life story interviews. This four-day, online training course could be just what you need.

In Autumn 2024, three of Australia’s leading oral historians, in partnership with Oral History Victoria, are pioneering an oral history intensive course aimed at university research students. We will teach you how to plan an oral history project and apply for ethics approval. You’ll learn how to create excellent interviews and document the recordings for use in research. We’ll explore approaches to analysing interviews and interpreting memories. And we’ll consider how to write a thesis using oral history as well as other types of oral history productions.

You will be active participants in the teaching and learning: reading a selection of key texts, bringing examples and issues from you own research, workshopping issues with the group, conducting practice interviews, discussing interview extracts from each participant, and developing a peer support group of graduate oral history researchers from around Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia. Each day school will be taught online via Zoom, from 9.30am-4pm Australian Eastern Standard time. The course will be limited to 18 participants.

Course outline

Day 1 Friday 19 April - Planning Your Oral History Project & Seeking Ethics Approval Day 2 Saturday 20 April - Creating & Documenting Oral History Interviews
(fortnight break while participants conduct practice interviews)
Day 3 Friday 3 May - Interpreting Oral Histories 

Day 4 Saturday 4 May - Making (Oral) Histories in Writing and other Media

NOTE: If you are seeking funding support from your university or institution to register for this training, please note that OHV does not have the administrative capacity to liaise with universities and training institutions regarding payments. We recommend that students pay for their ticket and be reimbursed by their institution. If these fees put this course out of reach for you, please get in touch with OHV via our contacts page on our website. OHV members benefit reduced rates for registrations. For more details on OHV membership visit.

Trainer profiles

Carla Pascoe Leahy will co-teach days 1 and 3 of the course. Carla is an experienced oral history practitioner who has worked at the University of Melbourne and University of Tasmania and now practises as an independent historical consultant. She is passionate about the power of storytelling and the importance of applying an ethics of care to the oral history relationship. Carla has used oral history to uncover intimate and emotion-rich stories of childhood, adolescence, and parenthood, as well as illuminating human relationships to place and environmental change. Her monographs included Spaces Imagined, Places Remembered: Childhood in 1950s Australia ((2011) and Becoming a Mother: An Australian History (2023) and she was Joint Editor of Studies in Oral History, the journal of Oral History Australia, from 2019 to 2023.

Sarah Rood will co-teach days 2 and 4. Sarah is a professional consulting historian with Way Back When who has been working in the field for the past 20 years. She has seen the uses and applications of oral history change drastically, and has made oral history productions in a wide range of media. Motivated by a desire to help communicate the past and to help connect individuals and communities with history and identity Sarah has recorded countless oral history interviews. Firmly believing that everyone has a story to tell, Sarah aims to work with people to record their stories in a way that both documents their experiences and ensures that (with permission) it can be accessed by others in the future. Exploring the relationship between new technologies and oral histories has become a particular area of interest for Sarah in recent years.

Alistair Thomson will administer the course and co-teach all four days. Al has worked as Professor of Oral History at Sussex University and Professor of History at Monash University and has served as President of the International Oral History Association and of Oral History Australia. He has been teaching oral history in both community and academic settings since 1985, has supervised 37 successful oral history MA and PhD dissertations, and in 2018 won the Australian University Award for Teaching Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences. Al’s oral history books include: Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (1994), Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (2005), Moving Stories: an intimate history of four women across two countries (2011), Oral History and Photography (2011), The Oral History Reader (2016), and Australian Lives: An Intimate History (2017). He is currently co-editing The Bloomsbury Oral History Handbook.

NOTE: OHV reserves the right to cancel this training session if registrations are below a minimum required and under other unforeseen circumstances. In the event of a cancelation, a refund will be provided.