Interview with Erin McCarthy
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Description
Erin McCarthy (she/her) is from the South Side of Chicago and grew up in Wilmette, Illinois. She holds a BA in history from the University of Illinois, and an MA and a PhD in history from Loyola University. She was the first person in her family to complete a college degree. Currently, she is an associate professor in the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences Department at Columbia College Chicago. McCarthy’s oral history class and its students have produced more than 400 transcribed oral history interviews for collections such as the Veterans History Project, the Chicago Anti-Apartheid Movement Project, and Photography at Columbia College Chicago. She has also written papers on oral history, published articles in Oral History Review 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. She states that oral history creates knowledge and offers insight into people’s individual experiences. Besides teaching oral history at Columbia College Chicago, McCarthy also teaches sports history and history after the 1930s. Length: 62:13 minutes. Transcript: 21 pages.
Publication Date
12-1-2022
Publisher
Columbia College Chicago
City
Chicago
Keywords
higher education, oral history, history, archives, baseball, honors, Wilmette, Chicago, Illinois
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Education | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recommended Citation
Midwa, Peter, "Interview with Erin McCarthy" (2022). College Oral Histories, 2022. 6.
https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/ohx2022/6
Comments
In this interview, Erin McCarthy talks about teaching. A family friend encouraged her to teach college, and she first taught at Loyola, and then at Columbia College Chicago when a new faculty position became available. McCarthy mentions she was at first intimidated by students but eventually learned their rhythms and methods to teach in a Columbia classroom setting. McCarthy discusses her involvement in several oral history and humanities projects, and how her work in oral history has evolved. She discusses how her work was impacted by the pandemic and addresses changes at Columbia. With challenge comes innovation, exemplified through her history about how many facilities around the school have evolved. McCarthy ends the interview by wishing the future well.
This interview was conducted by graduate student Peter Midwa, and is part of the Oral History of Columbia College Chicago project documenting the history of this Chicago, Illinois institution.The biography and interview abstract were composed by undergraduate student Sydney Shelly.