Erin McCarthy

Erin McCarthy, PhD, is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Humanities, History and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago.

Dr. McCarthy holds a BA in United States History from the University of Illinois at Champagin-Urbana, an MA in Public History, and a PhD in United States history from Loyola University Chicago.

Dr. McCarthy’s courses include “Oral History: the Art of the Interview,” “The Great Depression and the New Deal,” and “Baseball in History & Literature: a Contested Narrative.” Her oral history students have contributed more than 200 transcribed interviews to the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project (VHP) and more than 100 transcribed interviews to the Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center in Chicago. During the 2009-2010 academic year, her students interviewed activists for the Chicagoland Anti-Apartheid Movement Project at Columbia College Chicago.

In the spring of 2010, she served as the oral history project manager for a pilot oral history program entitled Hard Times Yesterday & Today: Loving Chicagoan’s Experience of the 1930s Great Depression and the Current Recession for the Center for Creative Aging at Harold Washington College in Chicago. A multimedia exhibit based on the program traveled from Harold Washington College to the Skokie library in September of 2010.

Dr. McCarthy’s article “’Is Oral History Good for You?’ Taking Oral History Beyond Documentation and into a Clinical Setting: First Steps” was published in the Oral History Review in 2010, and her essay “Oral History in the Undergraduate Classroom: Getting Students into History” is included in Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians: an Anthology of Oral History Educators (Alta Mira Press, 2006). Most recently, McCarthy has been contracted to write Teaching Oral History at the Post-Secondary Level by the Oral History Association for their pamphlet series (fall 2011).

Dr. McCarthy is also a Regional Workshop Leader for the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project and board member of the Consortium of Oral History Educators. She has presented numerous oral history training workshops to a wide range of organizations and institutions, including the Teachers’ Academy for the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA), held in Sofia, Bulgaria (summer 2009). She is a past recipient of the Oral History Association’s Postsecondary Teaching Award (2006) and is a former fellow of Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office summer institute (2003). From 1997-2004, she was the lead oral historian for the Columbia College Oral History Project.

Contact Dr. McCarthy:

Mail:
Dr. Erin McCarthy
Columbia College Chicago
Department of HHSS
600 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL
60605

Phone:
312.369.7296

Email:
emccarthy@colum.edu