Course Description

Instructor:  Dr. Gloria Gayles (Professor and Director of SIS Oral History Program- Spelman College, Emory University PhD Graduate)

Introductory course on the significance of oral history interviews in twenty-first century research across the disciplines that direct us to family history and personal narratives.

In two seminars, each one an hour and a half in duration, we will

• identity the narrator and her or his importance to a research goal

• create a script that locates the narrator in place and in time

• practice conducting the interview

• learning to hear stories

• removing the questions

• writing the narrative

In a third seminar, we can talk images and symbols and celebrate!

Bio for Dr. Gloria Wade Gayles

Gloria Wade Gayles, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, earned the B.A. from LeMoyne College, the M.A. from Boston University, and the Ph.D. from Emory University.  A former W.E.B. DuBois Fellow at Harvard University and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Boston University, she has been awarded the CASE Professor of Teaching Excellence for the State of Georgia, the Emory University MEDAL for Scholarship and Service, and the Spelman College Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship. Wade Gayles is the author of four books and the editor of two anthologies, which have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In 2000, she founded The Spelman Independent Scholars (SIS), which is the first and only oral history project at an undergraduate institution in our nation that gives voice and visibility to African American women elders of the South across lines of faith and class who have ranged in age from 65 to 103. A twenty-first century project that opens the lens of AGE, SIS has published two student-edited volumes of Their Memories, Our Treasure:  Conversations with African American Women of Wisdom and They Saw the Sun First, an online journal of age-focused research and writing across the disciplines. Wade Gayles is now working with students on a third volume of the anthology.