Co-directors: Amy Starecheschi, Denise Milstein, Ryan Hagen, Mary Marshall Clark
PI: Peter Bearman

A team of sociologists, oral historians, and anthropologists at Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) and the Oral History Archives at Columbia is building an archive documenting New York City’s experience of the pandemic. The archive focuses on New York—a city of neighborhoods—to illuminate and document the social structure of the pandemic. The project combines sociology and oral history to create a rich, composite picture of the struggle against COVID-19 as it evolves over the next year and beyond.

For this project, they are conducting video interviews with each narrator three times over the course of twelve months. The voices from these interviews are enriched by written diaries chronicling daily life during the pandemic and survey data tracking the demography of participants and their social lives.

The public archive that results from this project will be available to researchers, health workers and advocates, historians, artists, and policymakers in 2022, although they expect to share some of our material before then.

Since late March, the team of thirty oral history interviewers has been working to record initial interviews with two hundred New Yorkers, including doctors, nurses, home health aides, funerary workers, doulas, parents, homeless people, organizers, artists, immigrants, teachers, other essential workers, public officials, and everyday New Yorkers of all kinds. At the same time, they are gathering chronicles and survey responses from a broad sample of the city’s population.

If you are interested in participating in this project by filling out a survey, writing chronicles, or participating in interviews, this info sheet will tell you how. You can also reach the team by email at covid19archive@gmail.com