Meet our Trustees

Journal Editor

Joanna Bornat

I am a long-standing OHS trustee and have been an editor of the society’s journal Oral History for over forty years. I am emeritus professor of oral history at the Open University where I taught in what was then the Faculty of Health and Social Care. I have a particular interest in remembering from a late life perspective and the contribution of oral history to changing understandings of the past, who gets to be a historian and retrieving marginalised experience. I have researched and published on reminiscence, migration, community history, inter-generational remembering, belief and non belief, biographical research methods and the re-use or secondary analysis of archived oral history. Over the years I have taken part in and organised various oral history conferences and I’m delighted to see that interest in recording memories continues to engage with an ever widening range of topics, drawing in new communities and making creative use of inclusive sound and visual technologies. When I’m not doing oral history I like to walk, cycle, read, engage with local history where I live in north London and be involved in local campaigning.

Trustee, Regional Adviser South East

Padmini Broomfield

An OHS trustee since 2009, I am also an Advisor for the South East region. As Liaison Trustee I support the Environment and Climate Change Special Interest Group (ECC-SIG). My oral history journey began in the late 1990s at Southampton Oral History Unit with recording the life stories of Asian women, shipyard workers and local communities. Now a freelance consultant, I work with heritage, educational and community organisations on participatory projects that explore the lesser-known stories of people, places and working lives. I also provide training, mentoring and external evaluations for heritage projects. Recent oral history work has involved recording and editing interviews on migration, manufacturing, maritime and regeneration themes to create content for museum displays, audio posts, online exhibitions and publications. I am particularly interested in collaborations where my interviews are interpreted and presented in creative ways to engage and captivate people.

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.

Honorary Treasurer

Alan Butler

I completed in 2016 an AHRC funded collaborative PhD called “Performing LGBT Pride in Plymouth 1950 -2012” with the University of Plymouth. The project involved the formation of a specific LGBT+ history accession for the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office (now The Box) which currently sits alongside the Pride in Plymouth’s Community Archive. This archive currently comprises around 100 oral history interviews along with memorabilia pertaining to the performance of LGBT+ identity in the city over a sixty-year period.

I continue to work with this archive through adding new stories and sharing this important heritage with the next generation. This supports my work as a co-director of Pride in Plymouth CIC, lecturer at Plymouth Marjon University and engagement officer at The Box. 

In 2012, the Plymouth LGBT+ Community Archive was awarded the “Most Inspirational” archive award by the Community Archive and Heritage group, which I now chair along with Society’s LGBTQ Special Interest Group.

Journal Editor, Nominations Subcommittee Convenor

Verusca Calabria

I am a long-standing trustee of the Oral History Society. I am an Associate Professor of Mental Health histories in the Department of Social Work, Care and Community at Nottingham Trent University. My research sits at the intersection of the social history and heritage of mental healthcare and I specialise in the co-production of mental health histories. I co-founded and co-convene the Nottingham Trent University Oral History Network. My latest project, “Fifty Years of Middle Street Resource Centre” explored and documented the rich and hidden history of a mental health day centre using oral history inclusive art-based methods, including illustrations, artwork, poetry and film. You can find out more about the project on my website: www.mentalhealthcarememories.co.uk/. I co-chair the Oral History Society’s Higher Education Special Interest Group. I am on the management committee of the National, International and Transnational Histories of Healthcare, 1850-2000 (EuroHealthHist) COST Action and I lead the Action’s working group ‘Heritage and Public Engagement’.

Trustee

Juanita Cox

I am currently a Research Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies, working on a three-year AHRC-funded oral history project, ‘The Windrush Scandal in its Transnational and Commonwealth Context’. I gained my PhD in 2013 from the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham. In 2017, I co-founded the series Guyana SPEAKS, an education and networking forum, which has become a monthly event in the calendar of the London-based Guyanese diaspora. My poetry has been published in anthologies of black womanhood including Songs of Yemaya (Diaspora Records, 2017) and in the international anthology of writings by women of African descent, New Daughters of Africa (Vintage, 2019). I was also an Associate Fellow of the London Metropolitan University, where I lectured for three years in Caribbean Studies and Black British History.

Regional Adviser Eastern England

Juliana Dempsey

I am an OHS Regional Adviser for the East of England region and provide advice, support and training to individuals and groups undertaking their own oral history projects, as well as working as a freelance oral historian and heritage project manager. I am also a trustee of the Oral History Society. I always love hearing people’s stories and never get tired of the surprises they tell you about their lives.

For almost twenty years I have collaborated with artists, creative practitioners, community projects and volunteers to record and document stories about the past, people and places in order to communicate stories, share information and involve audiences. 

I have edited audio clips for exhibitions, trained volunteers in oral history interviewing, recorded hundreds of interviews, worked with national and local museums, created films with community groups and been successful in obtaining funding for my own community projects.  

Recent projects include:

• The Over 50s Black Men Forum, Sòrò Sókѐ oral history project
• Gurkha Stories
• V&A Museum of Childhood
• WWII Veterans, Biba stories and sub cultures for Southend Museum
• Cambridge University Press  
• Colchester Castle Museum
• Legasee Veterans Archive
• Norfolk County Council (Time and Tide Museum)
• Essex County Council (Seaside heritage)
• BBC Radio Suffolk

Please get in touch via email: [email protected]  

Special Interest Group Co-ordinator

Craig Fees

My oral history roots are in family, and I came by way of theatre and a 45 minute interview with a prominent Los Angeles actor where I forgot to take the recorder off pause, to Leeds and the Cotswolds as a PhD student in the Institute of Dialect and Folklife Studies where the local community of Chipping Campden sent me galloping on the lifelong road of learning about oral history I’m still engaged in. Oral history was central to the archive and study centre I was asked to establish and developed over thirty years, which was devoted to therapeutic, care and educational environments – schools, prisons, psychiatric units, children’s homes, communities – which shaped my practice, and understanding of oral history as a tool for building community, and sense of self, place, and belonging. I’m an Honorary Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at the University of Birmingham, course author and tutor in Oral History in the Centre for Archive and Information Studies at the University of Dundee, and within the OHS am a Trustee, with a special role working with and for Special Interest Groups.

Chair, Regional Adviser London

John Gabriel

I became Chair of the Oral History Society in 2017 and I am a member of the Society’s Higher Education and Migration Special Interest Groups. I am also currently a member of the organising group for our 2022 Annual Conference on the theme of ‘Home’. I have participated in community based oral history projects since the early 2000s including those on refugees, young people in care, work experiences in declining industries of the Thames Gateway and lost trades in the London borough of Islington. I have recently collaborated with Jenny Harding and Verusca Calabria on a three day course for PhD students at universities in the south of England. I work part-time as a senior professor of Sociology at London Met. University where I teach health ethics and research methods. My research interests include racism, learning and teaching in higher education and oral history, of course!

Trustee

Rumi Dahar

I am currently an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London. In my project, I use oral history interviews to delve deep into the spiritual journeys and spaces of Muslims of marginalised genders and sexualities. In combination with the interviews, I carry out autoethnographic research in order to explore the evolution of Islamic feminism and its particular influence on LGBTQIA+ Muslims. I have been awarded funding by the AHRC to develop community-oriented projects based on this research in partnership with a participant and digital artist. Aside from my PhD research, I am a freelance reader for Wasafiri, and I carry out spiritual duties and organising in a number of inclusive Muslim spaces. I am nourished by contemplative reading and listening and the art of storytelling, recognising knowledge in all its forms, including spiritual, emotional, and embodied. 

Higher Education Co-ordinator

Jenny Harding

I am Professor of Media and Culture at London Metropolitan University. I have researched and written about cultural theory, emotions, gender and sexuality and have been involved in a number of community based oral history projects. I am a trustee of The Oral History Society, one of the editors of Oral History, Chair of the Oral History in Higher Education Special Interest Group and a member of the LGBTQ+ Special Interest Group.

Trustee

Amy Tooth Murphy

I am a Lecturer in Oral History at Royal Holloway, University of London. I specialise in oral history and queer history, never happier than when bringing these research and teaching interests together, using oral history to record and analyse the stories of LGBTQ people in their own words. I am passionate about using history to explore and combat inequality and injustice, both historical and in our contemporary world. As such I am deeply invested in the histories of marginalised and oppressed identities and communities. I grew up in a politically engaged household, and my path to oral history began there, learning that ‘having a voice’ meant the difference between inclusion and exclusion. I went to school in the days of Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), which prohibited the ‘promotion of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’ in state schools. In part, I do what I do as an act of reclamation, and defiance against political and education systems that told me that LGBTQ identities and lives were not valid. For me, oral history is a tool that breaks down barriers and builds communities up. It is a way in which we can speak truth to power.

Publicity Officer

Cai Parry-Jones

I have been a Trustee of the OHS since 2017 and I am chiefly responsible for planning and managing the Society’s digital communications. I was first introduced to oral history as an undergraduate, but my involvement in the field really began during my PhD when I worked on an NLHF-funded oral history exhibition project called ‘Hineni’ with both the Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History and Arts Centre. 

I am currently working on the exhibition for the proposed UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in London. Prior to this, I worked as a Digital Collections Manager at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library and as an Oral History Curator at the British Library, where I worked on several in-house and partnering exhibition projects with organisations like Tate Britain and the Library of Birmingham. I am interested in how the GLAM sector uses oral history, particularly in exhibitions and online resources, and alongside researching the history of Welsh Jewry, I volunteer as an oral history interviewer for the History of Parliament Trust. 

Rydw i’n siarad Cymraeg ac mae croeso i chi gysylltu â mi yn Gymraeg.

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.

Vice Chair, Web Officer, Regional Adviser Wales

Beth Thomas

At present I’m the Vice Chair of the OHS but I’ve been a Trustee since the 1980s. I’m also a Regional Adviser for Wales. I’m now retired, but before that I worked for many years at the open-air museum at St Fagans, Cardiff. I worked there as a dialect researcher, sound archivist and oral historian, eventually becoming Keeper of History and Archaeology for the National Museum of Wales as a whole. Before retiring, I was very proud to have led the content team for the redevelopment of St Fagans as a participatory national museum of history – a project that resulted in the museum being awarded the Arts Fund Museum of the Year in 2019. Since retirement, I have been responsible for redeveloping and managing the OHS’s website. If you are in Wales and would like advice about an oral history project, please get in touch.

Rwy’n siarad Cymraeg ac wedi gweithio gyda chymunedau ar hyd a lled Cymru. Os ydych yn gwneud prosiect hanes llafar trwy gyfrwng y Gymraeg, mae pob croeso ichi gysylltu am gyngor.

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.

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, North East

Adam Bell

I love oral history, and I have the pleasure and privilege of being paid to do it as an important part of my job! I’m a social history museum curator with almost 20 years’ experience of working with communities and individuals to tell their stories through museum exhibitions, and preserving their heritage in museum permanent collections.

I have lots of experience of working on oral history projects in the North East, on subjects including shipbuilding and ship repair, coal mining, travelling funfairs, football, COVID-19, women’s working lives, and others besides.

I recorded my first oral history at about the age of 11, on a C90 cassette tape. The interviewee was my grandfather Gary, and the topic was his experiences as a child in WW2. I still cherish those first recordings to this day.

I studied history at uni, specialising in social and cultural history. My master’s dissertation was on the extent and use of oral history in Northern Ireland’s registered museums.

Trustee

Cathlin Macauley

I am Curator of Scottish Collections and the School of Scottish Studies Archives at the University of Edinburgh. The School of Scottish Studies was established in 1951 to collect, research and archive materials relating to cultural life, folklore and traditional arts. Active fieldwork was a primary remit and we now have a sound archive with over 30,000 recordings in Scots, Gaelic and English (including donated collections), an ethnological photographic archive and a manuscript archive. Among the recordings are various oral history projects which focus largely on working lives in urban and rural areas.

I have been working here since 2001. For most of that time I have been on the Committee of the Scottish Oral History Group. I am a Trustee of the Scottish Working People’s History Trust. I am also on the Working Group on Archives for SIEF (International Society for Ethnology and Folklore) and the Research Archives Section of IASA (International Association for Sound and Audiovisual Archives).