Fall 2025

This course explores the archive as a living, performative space through the lens of Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic work and Black women’s oral history traditions. Each week, students engage The HistoryMakers Digital Archive as both a research tool and a performance site — listening closely to the rhythms, silences, gestures, and vocal qualities that carry memory across generations.

Our approach is grounded in Tina Campt’s "Listening to Images," which offers a method for listening beyond the visible — to the quiet, the refused, and the sonic textures of Black life. Campt helps us learn how to listen to oral history as performance. Meanwhile, Hurston’s fieldwork, essays, and theories guide what we listen for — from storytelling and spiritual expression to Black vernacular traditions and cultural survival.

Students will read selections from "You Don’t Know Us Negroes" alongside oral histories from Black artists, thinkers, and cultural workers featured in The HistoryMakers. Supplemental texts by theorists such as Ashon Crawley and D. Soyini Madison help us understand performance as a form of knowledge.

Through in-class listening labs, weekly logs, and creative digital projects, students will learn how to interpret and curate oral histories with critical care and cultural imagination. Throughout the course, we’ll ask: What does it mean to listen with care? What can performance teach us about memory, community, and survival? And how do we find ourselves — and our responsibilities — in the archive?

Course Texts: The HistoryMakers Digital Archive; You Don’t Know Us Negroes, edited by Genevieve West and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

To the left is a link to student project examples and artist statements for this course including both live and digital projects. The link also includes the assignment description and important documents needed for students to complete major projects. Below is an example of the flyer I created for the course and live videos of the midterm.