OHR Conversations: Lana Dee Povitz on Shared Authority, Oral History, and Literary Journalism
In this installment of OHR Conversations, Oral History Review co-editor Janneken Smucker welcomes Lana Dee Povitz for a conversation about ethics in oral history, the delicate relationship between interviewers and narrators, the differences between oral history and journalism, and and what happens when you love your narrator too much. Povitz authored the recent, “Warm Distance: Grappling with Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism,” an academic article that reads like the best New Yorker essay, published in OHR’s Fall 2021 Special Issue on Ethics.
Listen to the audio here, or watch the recorded interview on the OHR’s Youtube channel
Lana Dee Povitz is a writer and social movement historian. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Middlebury College and is currently working on a biography of the feminist Shulamith Firestone. Her first book, Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice, was published in 2019. Her work has appeared in the L.A. Review of Books, Feminist Studies, Histoire sociale/Social History, and the Canadian Historical Review, and her research has been supported by the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Mellon Foundation, and the New York Council for the Humanities. Learn more at www.lanadeepovitz.com.
