Biography
Sarah A. Torgeson is a PhD candidate in American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she currently serves as a field scholar for the Southern Oral History Program. She received a BA in history from Yale University (2014) and an MA in American studies from UNC Chapel Hill (2020). Prior to graduate school, Sarah worked as an historic resources specialist at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, MS. Originally from Waveland, MS, Sarah has dedicated her academic career to researching the United States Gulf Coast, focusing specifically on how historical memory of hurricanes has shaped the region. Her dissertation project examines how Gulf Coast elders experience and think about major storm events.
Research
As the United States faces the realities of an aging population and increasingly severe weather events due to climate change, concern about older adult vulnerability to disaster has increased significantly. Even so, little of the growing scholarly literature on the topic explicitly centers older adults as experts on their own experiences. My dissertation seeks to both locate older adults in existing Gulf Coast hurricane narratives and invite local elders to speak back to, challenge, affirm, amend, and qualify those narratives.
To facilitate this, I will establish an oral history project on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Collaborating with local elders and other community stakeholders, I will record oral histories that consider what it means to age in an environmentally precarious place. Methodologically, the project will combine traditional one-on-one oral history interviews with Critical Oral History group forums. These two approaches to oral history will allow my co-researchers to reflect individually and collectively about their experiences, contributing to the production of more complex historical documents. I hope that this hybrid oral history project will also encourage intergenerational community building and establish new public spaces where older adults can connect to each other and the broader community.
