Meet our Regional Advisers
Our accredited Regional Advisers are all members of the Oral History Society and experienced in oral history. They come from a wide range of backgrounds – community projects, libraries, museums, archives, and academic institutions – so there will always be someone who can help with your specific queries.
They are willing to assist anyone new to oral history or wanting to discuss their work with someone who is sympathetic and knowledgeable. They will act as a first point of contact for enquiries, give advice, and where appropriate refer you to other appropriate contacts or sources of guidance.
Our Regional Network Co-ordinator, Padmini Broomfield, would be happy to advise you on who to speak to in your area or you can browse the Regional Network pages on this website.
Regional Network Co-ordinator
Padmini Broomfield
An OHS trustee since 2009, I am Coordinator of the Regional Network and 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.
Regional Adviser
Juliana Dempsey
I’m a Trustee of the Oral History Society and a Regional Adviser for the East of England region.
I also provide training and professional advice for oral history projects and have almost fifteen years of experience in managing heritage projects in many different subject areas. I work with museums, community groups, charities and local authorities to deliver oral history projects.
Recently I have delivered support for exhibitions, trained volunteers in oral history interviewing, recorded interviews, worked with national and local museums, created films with community groups and been successful in obtaining funding for my own community projects.
I’m enthusiastic about projects where people’s interviews proactively use new technologies to tell their stories creatively. I also enjoy seeing stories interpreted into theatre and dance.
Since 2008 I have worked with the V&A Museum, Cambridge University Press, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex County Councils, the M.O.D. and the Gurkhas plus several charities.
Regional Adviser
Simon Bradley
I am currently working freelance in North West Cumbria, after having moved here fairly recently. The pandemic disrupted my practice, as it did for many, but I did venture into online possibilities, in particular with Signal Media via Zoom workshops towards their exhibition combining oral history with the fabulous imagery of the Sankey Photographic Archive. I am now concentrating on small-scale projects and sound work. Before the pandemic, I worked on behalf of the Imperial War Museum (Contemporary Conflict), and interviewing and editing for the King’s Cross Story Palace. In 2016, I completed my doctoral thesis entitled ‘Archaeology of the Voice’. The project was based on over 60 interviews I carried out in the Holbeck area of Leeds, focused on producing multi-vocal oral histories as GPS-located sound, accessed by walking in the locality. I have worked as a freelance community artist on many digital media projects involving place, memory and voice. Major public history projects include: Memories of Leeds City Varieties (2010-11); Lasting Moment (2009), Leeds City Museum; Sonic City (2006-9), Leeds City Council. My specialities include interviewing, audio walks, sound recording, editing, and site-specific work. I also provide introductory training sessions for oral history practice.
Secretary, Regional Adviser
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.
Trustee, Regional Adviser
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
Colin Hyde
I manage the East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA) at the University of Leicester. My involvement with oral history goes back to the Leicester Oral History Archive, which I joined in 1988. Since then, I have worked with many community-based oral history projects. I have been with the EMOHA since 2001 and from 2018-2021 I managed the Midlands hub of the British Library’s ‘Unlocking Our Sound Heritage’ project, which was based at the University of Leicester. This was followed by EMOHA’s ‘Sounds for the Future’ project, which was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. I have many years’ experience of giving advice, help and training in oral history. I have helped to create oral history related exhibitions, newsletters, books, videos and web exhibitions. Among many interests, I particularly like recording stories of urban environments, and creative uses of sound.
Regional Adviser
Sarah Gudgin
I am an OHS Regional Adviser for the London 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 professional. I am experienced in working with partners in a wide variety of settings, including museums, community heritage projects, arts organisations, charities and diverse communities.
I am interested in creative and innovative approaches to collecting and interpreting oral history. I have collaborated with artists, creative practitioners and participatory community projects to explore stories about the past, people and place in order to communicate ideas, share information and involve audiences. I am a committee member of the OHS Creative Oral History- special interest group (SIG).
As a freelancer, I have used my expertise to work in a range of settings to interview on a wide range of topics, to curate exhibitions, develop gallery inter-actives and A/Vs, as well as edit content for online exhibitions, using oral history materials to engage and educate. I was previously Curator of Oral History at the Museum of London (2000-2013) where I was responsible for the care, management and development of a large oral history collection and archive used in exhibitions and galleries.
I am an accredited oral history trainer with the British Library/OHS and have supported and trained volunteers of all abilities to collect new oral histories and run their own heritage projects. I am also an accredited reminiscence practitioner and have delivered creative memory and reminiscence projects with museums and communities.
Recent activities include recording LGBTQ+ oral histories for Islington’s Pride; video oral history interviews with second and third generation Holocaust survivors for the IWM and a community heritage oral history project for the South London Gallery.Please get in touch via email: thinkingtime@hotmail.co.uk
Chair, Regional Adviser
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!
Regional Adviser
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
John Burgess
On reflection my involvement with oral history possibly began, albeit unwittingly, when I was given a reel to reel tape recorder for my fourteenth birthday and I recorded my grandmother recalling her childhood memories in her beautiful soft Somerset voice.
This early fascination with sound recording eventually led to me joining the BBC and a career in radio, where I worked on ‘both sides of the microphone’ as an interviewer and producer.
When I retired from the BBC and reluctant to ‘hang up the microphone’ I immersed myself in oral history, mainly with individuals who wished to record their life stories. Eventually I discovered the Oral History Society and my knowledge and interest in oral history broadened immensely. It was the perfect replacement for my radio days.
Several years ago I became a regional adviser for the society in the south west and now adviser where I provide help advice and training for heritage projects, history groups, schools, and various organisations who wish to embark on a oral history project.
I particularly like one to one recording of individual life stories.
Whatever your interest in oral history and wherever you are in the south west if you need help or advice please do get in touch.
Regional Adviser
Clare Jenkins
As a journalist, my interest has always been, in the words of Agatha Christie’s autobiography title, ‘Come, tell me how you live’. I’ve been a member of the Oral History Society for as long as I can remember and, at the tail-end of the 20th Century, worked on the ground-breaking British Library/BBC collaborative Millennium oral history project, The Century Speaks. I was Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield’s Centre for Oral History Research, where I worked on their Asian Voices project, and an oral history of the Two-Minute Silence, which led on to a Radio 4 programme on the same topic. I set up the Vox Pops oral history training company – www.voxpopsoralhistory.com – with Stephen Kelly, the OHS North-West regional organiser. We worked with community groups on projects as varied as deafness, rugby league, the Elephant and Castle area of London and the Miners’ Strike in Lancashire. I’ve interviewed people for drama-documentaries on subjects ranging from Isle of Man TT racers to gang deaths in Manchester, written and edited oral testimony-based books and, until 2019, I co-ran the radio production company Pennine Productions – www.pennineproductions.co.uk. We made a number of programmes centred on oral history, among them Teatime at Peggy’s – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tpwc7 – about India’s Anglo-Indian community. I am now co-writing a book on the same topic.
Regional Adviser
Emily Hewitt
I am a Regional Adviser for Wales, and Secretary of the Oral History Society’s Higher Education Special Interest Group. I currently work as an Assistant Archivist at the Richard Burton Archives, Swansea University. I have been closely involved with the Voices of Swansea University, 1920-2020 oral history project, with Dr Sam Blaxland (Department of History, Swansea University). This project includes over eighty interviews with past students and staff, and was created as part of Sam Blaxland’s publication Campus and Community in a Post-War World, 1945-2020 (University Wales Press, 2020) to mark the university’s centenary. I support undergraduate and postgraduate students using oral history as part of their research, and supervise student work placements and volunteers in oral history summarising and transcription. My oral history career began around 2010 when I volunteered on an oral history transcription project at the V&A Museum of Childhood. I graduated as an archivist the following year and worked as Assistant Archivist for the Oral History department and National Life Stories at the British Library until 2016, when I moved to Swansea University. In 2017 I was Project Manager on the Gower Landscape Partnership oral history project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund to preserve the history and heritage of Gower through oral history. My main interests are the archival management of oral history and exploring ways in which oral history can be made more accessible.
Regional Adviser
Margaret Tohill
I am a Regional Network adviser for the West Midlands.
My involvement in oral history work started in 1995 when I was asked to project manage a 5-year oral history project to record the reminiscences of the World War II generation living in Worcestershire. This work led to organising and running other oral history projects for the then Worcestershire Record Office and giving talks and presentations on oral history work locally and nationally. Since then I have also run oral history training courses for a variety of local groups and societies in Worcestershire and continue to give advice and guidance to groups and individuals who are thinking of setting up a project with some kind of oral history element.
More recently I have been involved in sorting and cataloguing a wide variety of oral history collections and training volunteers to transcribe and summarise oral history interviews.
In my current tole as a senior archivist with Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service I have a particular responsibility for dealing with archive collections, including our sound archive and oral history material.
Regional Adviser
Stephen Kelly
My interest in oral history began as a student at Ruskin College when I conducted a number of interviews for Raphael Samuel. After further studies at the London School of Economics I became a journalist and later a television producer with Granada TV; occupations that always involved interviewing people. After ten years at Granada I became a freelance writer and broadcaster and subsequently published three oral histories about football. These were followed by oral histories of Coronation Street, life in the 1950s and memories of British soldiers in the Korean War. I also founded the Centre for Oral History Research at the University of Huddersfield and was awarded a £120,000 grant for an oral history of rugby league. I also received an HLF grant for a study of Asian immigrants in Huddersfield during the 1960s and worked on an oral history of the Two Minute’s Silence. In more recent years I have been compiling an oral history of Granada Television (www.granadaland.org). Over the past 20 years I have trained volunteers on numerous oral history projects in the north west where I am the OHS regional adviser. I am currently Visiting Professor in Oral History at Manchester Metropolitan University and Visiting Professor in Journalism at the University of Chester.
Regional Adviser
Janette Hilton
Regional Adviser
Siobhán Stevenson
I am a Birmingham based Regional Advisor working with organisations in the cultural heritage sector, charities, community groups, artists, students, and volunteers. My work includes advising on project logistics, project management, interviewing and recording techniques, audio editing and re-purposing content as podcasts and for physical exhibition and digital distribution. I am currently exploring how VR/AR can be used to make oral histories more accessible.
I have worked on a wide range of oral history projects interviewing a variety of people from silversmiths in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter to teenagers across the decades for the Museum of Youth Culture. I have also trained project volunteers to interview and summarise testimonies of survivors of the Bangladesh Liberation War and and capture and re-purpose stories of Asian migration from East Africa to the UK. Working with the Downs Syndrome Association, I recorded the life stories of people in their 50s with downs syndrome, which were archived and displayed in the Museum of Learning Disability. I am currently working with Birmingham Museum’s Trust, to make the City’s Sound Archive accessible to communities and for re-use in creative projects.
I continue to believe oral history provides the opportunity for people whose voices are often left out to be heard and preserved for future generations. I love to connect with people working in this area, so drop me a line and let’s have a chat.
Regional Adviser, Trainer
Michelle Winslow
My roles within the OHS are Regional Network Adviser (South Yorkshire) and Accredited Trainer. I deliver courses in project management and palliative care as well as introductory and advanced courses. In my day job at the University of Sheffield I teach public health subjects and oral history in the School of Allied Health Professions, Nursing and Midwifery. I have worked on numerous oral history projects and specialise in palliative care and end-of-life. Since 2007 I’ve led an oral history project that offers people admitted to a Palliative Care Unit in Sheffield opportunities to create life history recordings for research and as personal and family records.
Vice Chair, Regional Adviser
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 and an accredited oral history trainer. 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 neu hyfforddiant.
Regional Adviser
Roger Kitchen
I began recording people’s memories in 1974, using the collected reminiscences as the source for local books. I co-founded Living Archive Milton Keynes (www.livingarchive.org.uk) and was its General Manager from 1992 to 2002 and am currently its Chairman. Living Archive’s basic premise is that everybody has a story to tell. Such stories and other primary source materials have inspired multifarious high-quality artistic, creative and educational activities including large scale musical documentary plays, books, radio and video documentaries, textile projects, exhibitions and websites. I have been an accredited Oral History Society trainer and have taught many tailored introductory courses, as well a courses in an introduction to video recording oral histories and digital sound editing. Over the last few years I have been recording many more interviews on video and using them to produce documentaries, as well as helping others do the same.
Regional Adviser
Pam Schweitzer
I have spent the last forty years developing reminiscence arts work, especially original reminiscence theatre productions, both professional and amateur. I founded the Age Exchange Theatre Trust and the Reminiscence Centre and was its Artistic Director from 1983 to 2005. I directed the European Reminiscence Network (1993 to the present) specialising in international reminiscence festivals and conferences and co-ordinating Europe-wide projects on reminiscence in dementia care. I am now based at the University of Greenwich, where I am developing the Reminiscence Theatre Archive and Website to preserve the interviews conducted over the years. I work with students on Reminiscence Theatre and Theatre-in-Education projects, often linking old and young in creative exploration of memories. I was awarded the MBE in the UK Honours List in 2000 for my services to reminiscence work. I was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Dementia Care Awards in 2014 and an Honorary Doctorate from University of Greenwich in 2017.
Regional Adviser
Sam Smith
I am an Oral History Society accredited trainer on the introductory and digital editing courses. I am also a regional network adviser for South Yorkshire. I am currently completing a PhD “Understanding oral history in palliative and supportive care” in the Health Sciences School at the University of Sheffield. I have been an oral historian for over 15 years, starting my career as an interviewer and 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 the Arts Council. I am particularly interested in oral history as a form of digital legacy, and the ethics of its public reuse in the digital realm. I teach this topic at undergraduate level at the University of Sheffield. If you’re looking for oral history advice or training in or around South Yorkshire, please get in touch.
Regional Adviser
Martin Bisiker
I specialise in the recording of filmed oral histories. I set up the charity Legasee Educational Trust in 2011 and I now have an archive of over 650 personal testimonies of military veterans. If you are considering the use of video for your oral history project, I will be happy to advise.
Regional Adviser
Sam Guthrie
I never expected to pursue a career associated with oral history, but it has become a core part of my practise in the heritage and community sectors. While pursuing my MA in Public History at Queen’s University Belfast I started out as lead cataloguer for National Museums Northern Ireland on the British Library project, Unlock Our Sound Heritage. Since then, I have led oral history projects across Ulster including “Stories on the Estate” with Ionad na Fuiseoige and “Our Stories – Our Times” with the British Red Cross. I have been closely involved with a number of community based projects on the Shankill and Falls Roads as well as a number of newly developing projects in East Belfast. I am particularly interested in the development of oral history in Northern Ireland and its differences and similarities to that produced in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. I also maintain strong connections with the Oral History Network of Ireland. If you’re interested in oral history projects and their ins-and-outs from start to finish, please do get in touch.
Regional Adviser
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.