Archives to Earbuds: Telling Our Stories

Podcasting can be a powerful tool for disseminating cultural and historical narratives otherwise ignored by mainstream media. The process of converting eclectic materials into an engaging narrative for listeners and balancing the distinct goals of historians and archival institutions with those of producers and publishers requires a deft understanding of the podcast medium.

Presented by: LBI (Leo Baeck Institute)

Online simulcast courtesy of: The Podcast Academy (TPA)

Natalia Petrzela (The New School, Past Present, Welcome To Your Fantasy) moderates a panel featuring the makers of podcasts working with primary sources and biography to shed light on historically marginalized communities and injustice. Panelists will include Eric Marcus of Making Gay History, Julie Golia of Flatbush+Main, Virginia Millington, Director of Recording & Archive at StoryCorps, and David Brown of LBI’s own Exile.

Participants

Moderator: Natalia Petrzela

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a historian of contemporary American politics and culture. She is the author of Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023). She is co-producer and host of the acclaimed podcast Welcome To Your Fantasy, from Pineapple Street Studios/Gimlet and the co-host of Past Present podcast. She is a columnist for MSNBC Opinion, a frequent media guest expert, public speaker, and contributor to outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the Atlantic.

Natalia is Associate Professor of History at The New School, co-founder of the wellness education program Healthclass 2.0, and a Premiere Leader of the mind-body practice intenSati. Her work has been supported by the Spencer, Whiting, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations. She holds a B.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. from Stanford and lives with her husband and two children in New York City.

Panelist: David Brown

David Brown joined Leo Baeck Institute in 2010. As Director of Public History, he edits the LBI website, newsletter, and other publications, and he organizes the LBI's public programs, including lectures, panel discussions, film screenings, and performances. He also works on special projects including exhibitions and donor relations and the launch of LBI’s podcast docudrama, Exile narrated by Mandy Patinkin. Before joining the LBI, David worked as a Public Diplomacy Specialist at the German Embassy in Washington, DC, where he edited online news about Germany for an American audience.

Panelist: Eric Marcus

Journalist and author Eric Marcus is co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, including this third season of the podcast, “Remembering Vilna.” Eric is also the founder and host of the award-winning Making Gay History podcast (Pineapple Street), which mines his decades-old audio archive of rare interviews to bring LGBTQ history to life through the voices of the people who lived it. Eric is the author and co-author of a dozen books, including, Making Gay History, Is It A Choice?, Why Suicide?, and Breaking the Surface, the #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis.

Panelist: Julie Golia

Julie Golia is a historian of media and gender, an acclaimed curator, and an award-winning educator. Currently, she is the Associate Director for Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books and the Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts at The New York Public Library.

Golia has led important collecting and outreach initiatives at the Library, including History Now: the Pandemic Diaries Project, which collected almost 300 audio recordings of people’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic to become part of the Library’s research collections. Before coming to NYPL, Golia oversaw curatorial affairs and collections at Brooklyn Historical Society, where she was also co-host and co-producer of the podcast Flatbush+Main.

Golia received her PhD in history from Columbia University, and she is the author of Newspaper Confessions: A History of Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Panelist: Virginia Millington

Virginia Millington, Recording & Archive Director at StoryCorps, a non-profit organization which aims to record, preserve, and share the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs, and amplify those stories during weekly broadcasts on NPR, animated shorts on PBS and via the StoryCorps podcast. She currently oversees the team responsible for maintaining the organization’s mobile and stationary recording venues across the country and archiving over 5,000 StoryCorps interviews every year. She has previously held positions at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Walker Art Center, and she received her MLS from the Pratt Institute.