Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Devin McGeehan Muchmore
Meeting time: Wednesday, 12:45 - 2:45
This course introduces students to twentieth-century U.S. LGBTQ history through a deep engagement with one of its signature methods—oral history. Oral history has been an essential method for queer historians because personal narratives shed light on the experiences, perceptions, and desires of sexual and gender minorities who too often appear in textual records only as criminals or patients, if they appear at all. Yet far from being a transparent or privileged window into the past, oral history practice highlights how emotions, memory, identity, and power shape historical knowledge production. By reading life histories and other genres of personal testimony alongside scholarly articles and monographs, documentary films, performance, and public history projects, students will develop analytical tools for thinking through the complexities of historical research and interpretation. The final assignment asks students to collect and analyze life histories related to Harvard's LGBTQ history.