Oprah Prepares for a Lesson in Personal History--Hers

A slim cardboard box is to arrive at Oprah Winfrey’s studios this week, bearing perhaps the year’s most intriguing reading for the nation’s most influential reader.

For all the writers dreaming of ways to get their work in front of Winfrey, these are pages she solicited. They are, of all things, a bunch of unpublished term papers by a group of history students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The term papers--14 of them, each a minimum of 20 pages, plus footnotes--are not about just anything, though. They are the culmination of an unorthodox course devoted to studying the historical significance of one American icon: Oprah.

“It’s just a strange, out-of-body experience to be standing there talking to people who are studying you as a [history] subject--and you’re still alive,” Winfrey said of meeting the students after a recent taping of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

The talk-show host and media mogul doesn’t surprise easily, being one of the most famous women on earth and all.

But this is a first, even for Oprah.

“I don’t have any context for that at all,” Winfrey, 47, said in a telephone interview. “So I’m just standing there trying to wrap my brain around it.”

She’ll have plenty more to try to wrap her brain around with the arrival of the term papers, which professor Juliet E.K. Walker planned to send by overnight mail Thursday from Urbana-Champaign, complete with her comments in the margins.

Winfrey said she was “beyond flattered” at being the subject of the course, and plans to read each term paper. “I wish I could have taken the class myself,” she said.

(And, yes, she confirmed, the papers will be evening reading in those luxurious pajamas her viewers know she loves to wear while poring over books in her Chicago condo high above the Magnificent Mile and at her weekend spread in Indiana farm country. She elaborated a bit on the pajama question: “I’m moving into pure cotton now that it’s gotten warm.”)

In the interview, Winfrey shifted again and again, as she does on the show, between a serious voice and a playful one, punctuated with laughter and her trademark it’s-just-us-girlfriends tone.

For all her passion for self-reflection and finding one’s calling in life, Winfrey said she has not yet done what the students did: Consider what her legacy will be.

“My feeling is, as I told them, I just do the work,” Winfrey said. ‘And [I’m] so involved in doing the work and then moving myself to whatever is the next work for me to do that I have spent very little time analyzing how I got to where I am or what was responsible for it or how I was motivated to keep going.

“At one point, I was thinking a lot about that when I was doing that autobiography and felt so overwhelmed by it. That’s why I abandoned the autobiography.”

Winfrey said she was puzzled when her companion, Stedman Graham, first showed her a newspaper article about the history course.

“I’m like, ‘This is a real class?’ ” she recounted.

Real it is, complete with tenured history professor, college credit and sleep-deprived students who last week handed in their term papers.

Walker, a longtime professor at the university and a specialist in the history of African American entrepreneurship, came up with the idea of offering “History 298: Oprah Winfrey, the Tycoon.”

The class, not surprisingly, is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.

Of course, some around campus have questioned what makes Winfrey, with a zeal for “lifestyle make-overs” and “Remembering Your Spirit” segments in her show, a worthy topic for a history course. Walker responds that Winfrey is one of those rare Americans who has managed not only to reflect the national culture but also to shape it.

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In Urbana-Champaign, Walker’s pupils studied traditional barriers to African American entrepreneurship, and how Winfrey, as a cultural icon, was able to build a powerful media empire that spans film, television, print and the Internet. Newsweek said her fortune is estimated to be $800 million.

As only a professor could put it, Walker said she is “using Oprah as a prism to get at the intersection of race, class and gender in the post-civil rights era.”

Each student picked his or her own topic for the term paper. Walker instructed the students to relate their theme to Winfrey’s business success, all in the context of historic barriers to African-American entrepreneurship.

James Creed, a junior whose mother is a librarian, researched the influence of Winfrey’s televised book club, a publishing industry phenomenon since Winfrey began it in 1996. Month after month, year after year, Winfrey’s selections become instant bestsellers.

Creed’s term paper about her book club, and another that incorporates W.E.B. DuBois, the black writer who theorized about the economic plight of many African Americans, were among the student topics that especially caught Winfrey’s attention.

In her paper, Deshonda Daniels, a 20-year-old history major, imagines what DuBois would make of Winfrey’s empire. DuBois died in 1963.

“I can’t wait to read it,” Winfrey later said of that paper, “because I think that’s really interesting.”

Other titles that await Winfrey: “History of Female Entrepreneurs of America: Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart,” “Body Image: Oprah Winfrey, An American Story,” and “Empowering Women: The Women’s Movement, The Glass Ceiling and Oprah.”

“The Oprah Winfrey Show” is broadcast in dozens of countries; in fact, one of Walker’s students researched Winfrey’s influence in Kenya.

“I do think I have and continue to have an amazing life. When you think of being born in 1954 and what people believed--what society, what the culture believed--was possible for a Negro child born in rural Mississippi compared to what has actually transpired, it is pretty amazing,” Winfrey said.

“But it’s not something I spend any time thinking about. So, yeah, I’m interested [in the students’ work]. I told them all, ‘Please send me your papers’ so I can have it. You know, they’ve done all the work for me so I don’t have to spend any time thinking about it,” Winfrey said, laughing again.