DePaul Documentary Corps: From the Classroom into the Archives

In the winter and spring quarters of 2021, DePaul’s Special Collections and Archives will partner with the HumanitiesX Collaborative on a new internship course, the DePaul Documentary Corps. The course, led by HumanitiesX Faculty Director, Prof. Lisa Dush, will teach students oral history, the ethics of documentary practice, and give them the opportunity to conduct, transcribe, and edit remote interviews. This hands-on work will be enhanced by frequent guest speakers from Chicago-area museums, and arts, culture, and community organizations.

DePaul Documentary Corps was developed as part of the HumanitiesX 2020-21 initiatives on “Understanding, Speaking in, and Documenting this Historic Moment,” designed to offer DePaul students, faculty, and community partners ways to connect, learn, and engage during a challenging year. Special Collections and Archives’ collaboration with HumanitiesX on this internship course grew out of common efforts to document this historic moment. Last spring University Archives launched the project on Documenting the DePaul Community’s Experience of COVID-19, which invited students, staff and faculty to share their personal stories from the pandemic and preserve them in the archives.

The collaborative nature of DePaul Documentary Corps allow students to learn practical methods for collecting and describing oral histories, while providing a level of engagement with those oral histories that encourages critical thinking about the lives and experiences that they document. The partnership will also assist in building skills and interest in students as archival creators, donors, and researchers—directly bringing the interviews from the classroom into the archives.

You can find more information about the DePaul Documentary Corps—including how to register for the winter 2021 section of the course or submit your interest in being interviewed by a Corps member—in this month’s “Into the Archives.”