Reusing Oral Histories

Reusing Oral Histories is the first comprehensive guide available to scholars and students looking to analyse or reanalyse archived oral history interviews.

Oral history scholarship to date has been primarily concerned with the analysis of oral histories conducted by the interviewer, despite the proliferation of archived oral history interviews. The reuse of interviews, some of which have been in the archives for years, poses specific challenges for researchers and offers many rewards. Across four chapters, this book furnishes readers with a detailed overview of the literature on oral history reuse, as well as discussing practical, methodological and ethical considerations, and the emotional challenges involved in reusing archived interviews. Based on international case studies, the book explores relationality, narrativity, and aurality of archived interviews. Reusing Oral Histories suggests three complementary modes of analytical listening – empathetic, active and relational – in order to understand both the interviews themselves and the memories and narratives they contain.

The book provides readers with the tools, methods and theoretical frameworks to engage fully in reusing oral histories. It will be of interest to students, archivists, and other practitioners of oral history as a practical guide and theoretical companion.

George J. Severs is a historian at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland, where he works on histories of sexual and reproductive health. He is the author of Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (2024) and an editor of Oral History.

Andrea Althaus is a historian and collection manager at the oral history archive “Workshop of Memory” at the Research Centre for Contemporary History, Hamburg. She specialises in oral history, migration history, gender history, and German-Jewish history in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Linde Apel is the head of the ‘Workshop of Memory’ interview archive at the Research Centre for Contemporary History, Hamburg. She co-founded the German Oral History Network in 2014. Her research interests focus on Holocaust history, contemporary and oral history and her most recent publication is Handbuch Oral History (2026).

Janine Schemmer is a cultural anthropologist and currently a postdoc researcher in the FWF-project “Discourses and Practices of the In-Between”. In her research and teaching, she focuses on memory culture and historical ethnography, narrative studies, spatial processes and social relations.