Leyla Vural

Leyla Vural is an oral historian and social geographer based in New York City. Her oral history work includes interviews with recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and other pre-eminent scientists about discovery; with artists about creativity; with trade unionists about the workers’ rights movement; with LGBTQ New Yorkers about life before and after the 1969 Stonewall Uprising; with neighborhood activists about preserving sites of cultural importance in working-class communities and communities of color; with community leaders about challenging systemic racism and getting caught in its throes; and more. For a series of one-night cabarets created by the theater company The Civilians, Leyla interviewed New Yorkers in Central Park and elsewhere on topics ranging from anarchism to Christmas. Some of Leyla’s work is available online and oral history interviews she has conducted are held at the Oral History Archives at Columbia University, The LGBT Community Center in New York, the New-York Historical Society, The Rockefeller University, and soon at Cornell University and the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Leyla has presented her work at conferences in Belfast, Glasgow, and Montréal. She has a PhD in geography from Rutgers University and an MA in oral history from Columbia University.