Meet our Trainers

Regional Adviser Yorkshire, Trainer

Michelle Winslow

I am a Trustee, Trainer and Regional Adviser with the Oral History Society and an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Sheffield’s School of Allied Health Professions, Nursing and Midwifery. For the OHS I deliver introductory, advanced and project management training, plus a course on oral history at the end of life.  I have supported and led oral history projects in various contexts for over twenty-five years, within my end of life specialism these have offered opportunities to create life history recordings as personal and family records and for research. 

Trustee, Regional Adviser East Midlands

Cynthia Brown

I am a Trustee of the Oral History Society, one of its Accredited Trainers, and a Regional Adviser for Leicestershire and Rutland. I started my oral history career in the 1990s in a community history unit at Leicester City Council, and in 2001 I helped to establish the HLF-funded East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA) at the University of Leicester, where I was Project Manager for three years. I have a particular interest in using oral history to research and interpret family history, and along with my colleague Mary Stewart I contributed an article on the subject, ‘Exploring encounters between families, their histories and archived oral histories’, to the Archives and Records journal in April 2017. Other articles include ‘Moving on: reflections on oral history and migrant communities in Britain’ in Oral History, Volume 34, No. 1. I have also written or edited a range of books using oral histories. I am now semi-retired but am still involved in historical research and writing alongside my involvement in the Oral History Society.

Regional Adviser Scotland

Alison Chand

I’m a regional adviser for Scotland for the OHS and a BL/OHS accredited oral history trainer. In addition, I deliver training for the Scottish Oral History Centre at the University of Strathclyde, where I am a research associate and teach on various undergraduate and postgraduate history modules, including the ‘Oral History Theory and Practice’ and ‘Work and Community Placement in Oral History’ modules. I am also a part-time lecturer with the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands and undertake freelance work as an oral historian, proofreader and copy-editor. I actively undertake oral history research, and am currently working on a BA/Leverhulme-funded project entitled ‘Rainbows in the Windows: An Oral History of Young Families in Britain in the COVID-19 Pandemic’. Please do get in touch if you are in Scotland and would like any advice on oral history.

Regional Adviser West Midlands, Trainer

Julia Letts

My current work revolves around training, interviewing, audio editing and creating podcasts, and managing oral history projects for the heritage, community and education sectors. This takes me all over the West Midlands and beyond where I advise and work with museums, galleries, schools, councils, community groups, arts organisations and wildlife charities. My career started as a BBC Radio Producer and branched into oral history after working as a producer on ‘The Century Speaks’ in 1999. I am an OHS accredited trainer and a key adviser on working with schools and young people. I co-produced the school resources on the OHS website and am a member of the Creative Special Interest Group. Do have a look at my website or give me a call.

Regional Adviser Yorkshire, Trainer

Sam Smith

I am an Oral History Society accredited trainer on the Introduction to oral history, Life story interviewing near the end of life and audio editing courses. I am also the OHS Regional Network Coordinator and an Adviser for South Yorkshire. I recently completed a PhD “Understanding oral history in palliative and supportive care” in the Health Sciences School at the University of Sheffield and I’m a sound artist interested in merging oral history with field recordings and music. I have been an oral historian for 20 years, starting my career as a coordinator on an oral history in palliative care service at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. I have also managed and consulted on several heritage oral history projects throughout the UK and worked for clients including England Heritage and Health Education England. I am particularly interested in oral history as a form of digital legacy, and the ethics of its public reuse in the digital realm. If you’re looking for oral history advice or training in or around South Yorkshire, please get in touch.

Trustee

Mary Stewart

I am Lead Curator of Oral History at the British Library and Director of National Life Stories, the oral history fieldwork charity. It has been my privilege to be a Trustee of the Society since 2008, and I recently led a review of the Society’s governance. I have helped to organise many OHS conferences and events, I sit on the Society’s Finance Sub-Committee and am an accredited Oral History Society/British Library trainer specialising in courses on Archival Management of Oral History and Data Protection. As part of the British Library’s oral history team I work to add diverse voices from across the UK to the Library’s Sound Archive, particularly through academic and community partnerships, and I recently was curatorial lead on an audio resource exploring the history of domestic life. I have project-managed several oral history fieldwork projects gathering long life story interviews – including on the UK Water Industry and Baring Bank. I am currently researching how oral history and family history intersect, which builds upon my studies of my own family history, and I have been delighted to collaborate with fellow OHS Trustees on advice for family historians using oral history. As a member of the #HistoriansCollaborate Network, we are bringing together academic, community and family historians, with archive and museum professionals to interrogate how we research the past in order to foster better collaboration.

Secretary, Regional Adviser South East

Rob Perks

I first discovered oral history when I was studying for a doctorate in political history, since when I helped establish the Bradford Heritage Recording Project in the early 1980s, working as a museum curator, before a period in television. From 1988 until my recent retirement, I was Lead Curator of Oral History at the British Library, and Director of National Life Stories since 1996, heading a team of interviewers, archivists and transcribers involved in oral history collecting and fieldwork in a variety of sectors: from arts and crafts to business and finance, from the utilities to science, from architecture to publishing. I’ve been Secretary of the Oral History Society and an editor of Oral History Journal since the later 1980s. I’ve acted as an advisor to a range of oral history organisations around the world, including the National Lottery Heritage Fund (HLF) and BBC Radio in the UK, and projects in Canada, Greece, India, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, China and Ireland. In 2007 I was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Huddersfield. My publications include The Oral History Reader (Routledge, third edition 2015, with Al Thomson). My last major project before retiring was ‘Unlocking Our Sound Heritage’, an ambitious five-year £18.8m project to digitally preserve 100,000 of the nation’s most rare and vulnerable sound recordings, both at the British Library and around the UK, working with a consortium partnership network of ten regional audio preservation centres.

Trainer

Rib Davis

I have worked for many years as an accredited trainer in oral history both in the UK and abroad (most recently with a NGO in Beirut). I also run oral history projects and act as an oral history consultant in a wide variety of settings, from galleries and museums to schools, youth groups and heritage, arts and community organisations. My involvement in the field began in the mid ‘70s in Milton Keynes, alongside Roger Kitchen and Roy Nevitt at The Living Archive. That eventually led to my researching, writing and mostly directing 15 large-scale oral history-based community plays, focusing on, for example, steel workers, miners, railway workers or communities that have virtually disappeared (such as the West End of Derby). 
2018-’19 I was the National Life Stories Goodison Fellow, writing Miriam, a stage play dealing with attitudes towards presentation of the Holocaust, taking as its starting point the Holocaust testimonies held at the British Library. I have also worked extensively as a playwright/ scriptwriter for non-oral history-based theatre, radio and television, and have written 2 books on scriptwriting. I am at present Chair of the OHS Environment and Climate Change Special Interest Group. 

Trainer

Rosa Schling

I’ve worked in oral history since 2008. I’ve managed more than ten community heritage projects, worked on and advised many others. I am currently a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Education, University College London, funding by the  London Arts and Humanities Partnership. I co-founded On the Record, an oral history and creative heritage organisation in 2012.  My expertise includes collaborative and participatory training and project management, oral history interviewing, exhibition curation, podcast and audio production and digital outputs. Examples of my projects include Grow Your Own: childcare history, the Childcare Voicespodcast series, A Hackney Autobiogaphy: Remembering Centerprise, Holding the Baby. My work has won awards, including the Women History Network’s Community History Award (2020), and a Silver Audio Production Award (2024). 

Trainer

Sarah Lowry

I have been working in oral history for 20 years. Initially I was involved as a project manager, running the Refugee Communities Histories Project at the Museum of London and the Foundling Voices Project at the Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury. Keen to move from management to interviewing, I then took at job at the Royal College of Physicians of London where I now work as the Oral History Officer, interviewing hospital doctors about their careers and the changes they have witnessed in medicine and medical training. I also freelance for the Royal College of Surgeons of London doing a similar role. As a long term resident of Ealing, I also have a real interest in local history and do a lot of work for Gunnersbury Park Museum, helping to catalogue their large oral history collection over many years and recording new interviews on topics such as migration and industry.  In 2011 I joined the OHS / BL oral history training team and I love to go out and meet with groups across London, and sometimes further afield, hearing about their work and helping to establish their oral history projects.

Regional Adviser North West

Rosalyn Livshin

I am an Oral History Society accredited trainer on the introduction and tailored training courses. I am also a regional network adviser for the Greater Manchester area.

I started my oral history career in the 1970s working for the Manchester Studies Unit of Manchester Polytechnic. There I was responsible for building up the archive of oral testimonies taken from the older members of the Manchester Jewish community, who were the children of immigrants and I also began to interview refugees and survivors of the Holocaust. This collection was deposited with the Manchester Jewish Museum when it opened in 1984.

I continued to interview refugees and survivors of the Holocaust for many projects, including the Manchester 45 Aid Society, the British Library’s Living Memory of the Jewish Community and video interviewer for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. I was the North-West co-ordinator and video interviewer for the Association of Jewish Refugees ‘Refugee Voices’ project, the interviewer for a project at Manchester University for a book on the refugee experience in Manchester and oral history trainer and interviewer for the Windermere ‘From Auschwitz to Ambleside’ project. My PhD (2015) on Nonconformity in the Manchester Jewish Community; the case of political radicalism, 1889-1939, drew upon my early interviews and new ones. In 2020-21, I produced the audio and text for the Memory Map of the Manchester Jewish Community, which is available online. I currently work as a freelance Oral Historian, recording lifestories.