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Public Historians at Work
Welcome to “Public Historians at Work,” a podcast series from the Center for Public History at the University of Houston, Texas. Our vision at CPH is to ignite an understanding of our diverse pasts by collaborating with and training historically minded students, practitioners, and the public through community-driven programming and scholarship. In this podcast series, we speak with academics, writers, artists, and community members about what it means to do history and humanities work for and with the public. Check us out at www.uh.edu/CLASS/cph or find us on social media @UHCPHistory. Executive Producer: Dr. Kristina Neumann (kmneuma2@central.uh.edu)
Public Historians at Work
Archiving Cancer Care at MD Anderson: Javier Garza
If a medical institution’s mission is to make cancer a relic of the past, the archivist’s role is to collect, preserve, and make that history available. So says Javier Garza, Senior Library Analyst and Archivist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Historical Resources Center in Houston, TX. In his interview with graduate student Allison Anderson – recorded on November 19th, 2021 – Garza describes how he got involved in the dynamic and communal effort to document and digitally disseminate the development of the nation’s leading cancer center. Garza discusses the unique challenges of bringing medical archives and a robust oral history collection to the general public while balancing patient privacy and institutional transparency.
For more on MD Anderson's Historical Resources Center, go to: https://www3.mdanderson.org/library/hrc/index.html
To access “The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Project”: https://www3.mdanderson.org/library/hrc/interviews.html
Editing assistance of this episode provided by Dylan Allen.
The Center for Public History at the University of Houston. https://uh.edu/class/cph