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Making Records for Four Decades

Center for Oral and Public History Inaugurates Hansen Lecture

Arthur A. Hansen

August 29, 2008 :: No. 024

As it marks its 40th year on campus, Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Oral and Public History will inaugurate the Hansen Lecture Saturday, Sept. 6.

Named in honor of Arthur A. Hansen, emeritus professor of history and former director of the center, the event will feature two panels highlighting approaches and methods for documenting history.

The 1-4:30 p.m. program in the Titan Student Union’s Titan Theatre is open to the public free of charge.

Natalie M. Fousekis

“The theme for the afternoon is connecting oral and pubic historians with the communities in which they live, research and work,” said Natalie M. Fousekis, associate professor of history and center director. “The panels will serve as the inaugural Hansen lecture to celebrate and honor Art Hansen for his 42 years of service as a faculty member and his 23 years as the director of the COPH.”

Hansen “played a key role in the nurturing and development of the center, first working alongside other faculty and colleagues, and since 1991, as the director of the COPH,” Fousekis said.

“He has been instrumental in spearheading projects that have provided insight into the region’s diversity and collective memory. Through his oversight of the center and as a faculty member in history, Art has worked with hundreds of CSUF students, alumni, faculty and staff. Outside CSUF, Art has been a leader in the field of Japanese-American history and in the Oral History Association, serving as the organization’s president in 2002-03 and as editor of the Oral History Review from 1981-87.”

She added that the Hansen lecture will become an annual event, featuring prominent leaders in the field of oral or public history.

Saturday’s first panel, titled “Connecting Communities,” aims to explore oral history-based performance. Fousekis organized the panel to highlight the possibilities for performance-based oral history collaboration in the future.

“I also want to expose Fullerton students and other local scholars to the different ways performance artists engage history and memory, both locally and internationally,” she said. “In the future, I'm hoping to collaborate with performance artists so that I can bring the oral histories COPH conducts/has conducted back to the communities that surround us.”

The panelists are:

  • Catherine Cole, a UC Berkeley theater professor who teaches contemporary critical theory, feminism, African theater and performance studies and is the author of “Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre”

  • William Mittler, who writes and directs historical plays and teaches theater courses at Fullerton, Chaffey and Riverside City colleges

  • Della Pollock, professor of performance and cultural studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is working on an intimate ethnography of living with chronic or traumatic pain and spearheading a project that documents a long-term partnership with an African-American church that has evolved into a multi-faceted drama of social change.

    • Catherine Cole

    Della Pollock

    Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

    Serving as panel moderator is Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, director of the Southern Oral History Program and the Julia Cherry Spruill Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association, Hall was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 1999 for her efforts to deepen the nation’s understanding of and engagement with the humanities.

    The second panel is “Thinking Beyond Town and Gown: The Public Historian and the Community” and features:

  • David M. Kahn, executive director of the San Diego Historical Society

  • Alecia P. Long, professor of history at Louisiana State University

  • J. Mark Souther, associate professor of history at Cleveland State University and author of “New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City.”

    • David M. Kahn

    J. Mark Souther

    Linda Shopes

    Moderator will be Linda Shopes, an oral historian based in Carlisle, Pa.

    The Hansen Lecture is sponsored by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the History Department, the Center for Oral and Public History, European Studies Student Society, History Students Association and Phi Alpha Theta.

    For more information, visit http://coph.fullerton.edu or call 657-278-8475.

    Photos: Available online at www.fullerton.edu/newsphotos

    Media Contacts:
    Mimi Ko Cruz, Public Affairs, 657-278-7586 or mkocruz@fullerton.edu