About Us

The Brooklyn College Listening Project was founded by faculty at Brooklyn College (CUNY) in 2014, and formally launched in the spring of 2015. Since then, over 800 students across classes in a wide range of departments—American Studies, English, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Children’s Studies, TV and Radio, Journalism, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Judaic Studies, Music, Modern Languages and more—have conducted interviews with their families, neighbors, friends and strangers. Twenty-five to 30 professors have integrated oral history assignments into their classes. Over this time, our students have collected over 500 audio recordings of interviews for an on-line digital archive.

The Listening Project is designed to create new links between the college and the communities of Brooklyn, to take better advantage of the incredible wisdom of everyday people, and to showcase the brilliance of our students, and the community in which we all live—Brooklyn, New York City, and beyond.

This website gives you a taste of our students’ work—students from many classes. They are the oral historians whose work we are building on. We are currently building a site where you will be able to listen to the full oral histories.

Jessica Siegel wrote much of the text, in addition to many of her journalism students, including Israel Salas-Rodriquez, LaQuinta Clark, Jherelle Benn, Jonathan Gomez, Ivanna Machuca and Zainab Iqbal.

Leah Shaw, a graduate of Brooklyn College’s Feirstein School of Cinema Studies, created many of the podcasts of the oral histories that appear on this site and worked with both undergraduates and graduate students on others and edited the resulting oral histories. 

Students in Profs. Jonathan Zalben and Pontus Gunve’s Music Technology classes in the Media Scoring Program of Brooklyn College’s Feirstein School of Cinema Studies created a number of the podcasts as did our group of BCLP interns: Maruful Hossain, Jada May, Jasmine Peralta, Annabelle Paulino and Minela Sarkinovic. Weniber Bu organized our archive.

Prof. Miguel Macias created the Gentrification podcast and Prof. Joseph Entin did the same for the podcast based on Robert Scott’s oral history.

Many, many, many thanks to our great designer Shanthony Exum of Shanthony Art and Design of Brooklyn, N.Y. who created this website and the multimedia exhibition, “We Are Brooklyn: Immigrant Voices,” which is linked to on this website. The exhibition has toured New York City for a year and a half.

For More Information Contact

Joseph Entin, English and American Studies: jentin@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Madeline Fox, Sociology and Children’s Studies: madelinefox@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Miguel Macias, Television and Radio: mmacias@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Naomi Schiller, Anthropology: nschiller@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Jessica Siegel, English and Journalism: jsiegel@brooklyn.cuny.edu