Background

This project started as an assignment for a disease course taught by Dr. Molly Nebiolo, and then was readapted for other courses. The main learning outcome for the assignment was to get students connected with historical experiences of past pandemics by reflecting on their own lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was also an assignment used to get students familiar with oral histories as historical data and primary sources. A third reason this digital collection was created was to better collect the experiences, voices, and lives of our Butler University students for future students and researchers to study in the future.

Dr. Nebiolo was particularly influenced by the archiving work done by her alma mater, Northeastern University, with their project, “Journal of a Plague Year,” as she created this assignment for her students at Butler. She taught a pandemics course Fall 2020 along with Dr. Heather Streets-Salter, which included an oral history assignment much like the one used at Butler.

Initial Oral Histories [2024-2025]

The initial oral histories for this digital collection is made up of various COVID-19 oral histories recorded by students of Butler University from 2024-2025. There were 42 students initially recorded over the course of three courses. The initial three courses that used this assignment in class and make up the starting cohort of oral histories were:

• Text & Ideas (TI) 204: Global Pandemics, Summer 2024 - Dr. Molly Nebiolo
• History (HST) 306: Global Pandemics, Fall 2024 - Dr. Molly Nebiolo
• First Year Seminar (FYS) 102: Medical Humanities, Spring 2025 - Dr. Susanna Foxworthy Scott