On March 12 and 13, 2026, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress will host a symposium titled, “From Lived Experience to Public Memory: Commemorating, Documenting, and Archiving Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic." The American Folklife Center is now accepting proposals for the symposium from scholars, artists, documentarians, archivists, and community-based practitioners working at the intersection of COVID-19 and cultural heritage. In this post, find more information about the symposium and how to submit a proposal.
On March 11, 2025, the American Folklife Center held a panel discussion with four cultural documentarians of the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of the COVID-19 American History Project. In this post, we feature the webcast of the panel discussion, alongside photos from the event.
In this COVID Recollections post, we continue to commemorate the 5th anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a pandemic by highlighting the COVID-19 Street Art Archive—an online, archival collection of street art related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This post features an interview with Dr. Heather Shirey (Professor of Art History, University of St. Thomas) and Dr. Todd Lawrence (Associate Professor of English, University of St. Thomas), who created the COVID-19 Street Art archive. Shirey and Lawrence discuss their inspiration for the archive, their favorite items in the collection, and their thoughts on archiving art that is intended to be temporary. The COVID-19 Street Art Archive is just one of many collections available on the American Folklife Center's COVID-19 Research Guide. Find more at https://guides.loc.gov/covid-19-folklife.
Guest author Sue Rubenstein DeMasi is an academic librarian, professor emeritus at Suffolk County Community College in New York and dramatic writer and journalist. Professor DeMasi is the author of several publications on Henry Alsberg, Director of the New Deal era’s Federal Writers’ Project from 1935-39. Her essay for Folklife Today on Henry Alsberg’s early career expands on her talk at the 2023 American Folklife Center symposium marking the publication of the anthology, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (2022). The anthology and symposium offered a range of scholarly perspectives and retrospective analysis of the FWP on its 80th anniversary (see this blog post about the symposium); symposium webcasts are accessible here: https://guides.loc.gov/2023-federal-writers-project-symposium. Professor DeMasi's post touches on Alsberg's pre-FWP activities as a writer, book editor and theatrical producer, all of which were concerned with advancing the struggle for social justice and human rights.
