Meet the Journal Editorial Team

Peter Anyanga O Wasamba 

University of Nairobi, Kenya

I am a professor of African Literature at the University of Nairobi and also a law scholar and a practising advocate. I have research experience in oral literature spanning over two decades, including much work on oral testimonies in Kenya and Korea. I am especially interested in methodology, emerging ethical issues, and intellectual property rights in oral literature research.

In Kenya, oral history straddles various disciplines which employ interviews and performances to document people’s insights. Historians use oral history; sociologists refer to oral testimonies and in literature we use ‘Oral Literature’. In actual fieldwork situations, the research methods are the same. The competing terminologies are only for safeguarding disciplinary identities.

I have been a passionate user and trainer in oral testimonies from early 2000, using these approaches in academic circles and community development initiatives. Increasingly, these approaches are also employed by sociologists, economists, and medical researchers in Kenya to capture voices and perspectives of community members on the margins of existence.

I normally recommend the Oral History journal to my students, especially postgraduate students conducting research using oral testimonies methodologies. We published an article on fieldwork during the Covid-19 pandemic global lockdown that also brought wider interest in the journal among students and university colleagues. Kenya does not feature prominently in the journal’s International Section and I look forward to encouraging local researchers and students to contribute research papers and reviews to raise the profile of oral history work in Kenya.

Laura Benadiba

Otras Memorias Archivo Historia Oral, Argentina

Hello! I have many experiences to share! Excuse my sincerity but Oral History has to be a democratising process. In Argentina, much Oral History occurs at community level rather than in university settings due to restrictions on academic freedom. Writing for publication overseas is important to disseminate new knowledge and ideas. 

I began to use Oral History approaches in social sciences more than twenty-five years ago and since then my practical outreach, educational projects and research have resulted in publications, presentations and working with Oral History with all age-groups in and beyond Argentina. 

My Oral History projects include working with older adults and in prisons and by the time of the COVID pandemic, almost 2000 secondary pupils had attended Oral History congresses for schools. These events offer pupils and teachers opportunities to share, discuss and develop Oral History approaches as routes into understanding lived experience and recovering the unheard or underheard voices of peoples in different societies. 

My pedagogical writing on Oral History also includes teachers at nursery, primary, secondary and university level. Recent projects include the role of Oral History in understanding social movements, an essay on memory and a study of gender violence in which people could share personal experiences as they remained in charge of the interviewing process.

Riki van Boeschoten

Riki van Boeschoten University of Thessaly, Greece

My name is Riki Van Boeschoten and I am Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology and Oral History, University of Thessaly. I taught a core course in oral history at the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology between 2000 and 2015 and I have created at the same department an oral history archive containing over 1000 interviews. In 2012 I took the initiative with other oral historians to create the Greek Oral History Association (GOHA), which I chaired until November 2023. 

Throughout these years the Oral History journal has been a major resource and constant source of inspiration in my teaching and academic work, in the oral history workshops we run on a regular basis with the GOHA and in connecting the Greek oral history community with its international counterparts.

Indira Chowdhury

Indira Chowdhury Srishti-Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru, India

My journey into oral history began with interviewing scientists who worked in institutions that were set up in Independent India. I have found oral history to be a very critical method with which to understand change in postcolonial India. My own interest in how people experience change led me to also interview traditional artisanal communities who often struggle with modernity, industrialization and ever-changing technologies. The Oral History journal has been very important for me and my students because it engages with questions that are at the core of our practice with examples across the world. I was President of the Oral History Association of India, 2013-2016 and President of the International Oral History Association, 2014-2016. 

Sean Field

Sean Field University of Cape Town, South Africa

I am fascinated by how people consciously and unconsciously narrate their life histories. My academic career has involved the practice and teaching of oral history methodology. My PhD (from University of Essex) was on the Windermere/Kensington community and apartheid forced displacements and was completed in 1996. I began work in the Historical Studies Department in 1997 as coordinator of the Western Cape Oral History Project, and I also served as Director of the Centre for Popular Memory (CPM) from 2001 to 2012.

I was a founder member of the Oral History Association of South Africa (OHASA) and Vice-President of the International Oral History Association (IOHA) from 2008 to 2010. My current research involves: (post)colonial oral histories of violence, and debates about trauma theory, memory, and psychoanalysis. I am also interested in parenting styles of trauma survivors, and how the child’s sense of self is intersubjectively framed and anti-referential psychic trauma is constituted across generations.

Alexander Freund

Alexander Freund University of Winnipeg, Canada

I am a professor of history and I hold the Chair in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg, where I have also co-founded and directed the Oral History Centre. I am in the process of setting up an archive of oral histories and personal documents of German immigrants in Canada. I have conducted research and published on migration history and oral history since 1993. I am currently working on a history of refugees in Winnipeg since 1945, a book on oral history theory, and a project on German immigrant fathers and their sons in twentieth-century Canada. I am also co-editing (with Al Thomson and Erin Jessee) the Bloomsbury Handbook of Oral History. I regularly use Oral History for my research and teaching and occasionally I publish in the journal.

Anna Green

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

I am an adjunct professor at The Stout Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington | Te Herenga Waka. A historian for the past 40 years, I taught history, oral history and history and theory at Waikato, Exeter (UK) and Victoria universities. 

I am currently working on two oral history books. The first, a Royal Society Marsden-funded project, explores the transmission of memories about the family past within multigenerational families descended from nineteenth-century European settlers. In addition, I am editing, with Megan Hutching, a new anthology of oral history research in New Zealand which will be published by Otago University Press in late 2024. I am currently the president of the National Oral History Association of New Zealand | Te Kete Kōrero-a-Waha o Te Motu.

For my publications since 2012 see: 

https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/stout-centre/about/staff/associate-professor-anna-green

Juan J Gutiérrez 

California State University, USA

I am a Mexican cultural anthropologist currently working both in Spain and the US. My academic foundation was laid at the Mexican Universidad de Queretaro where I became an ethnohistorian. I later earned a PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I currently hold the position of lead faculty for the Cultural Anthropology Concentration within the Social Sciences and Global Studies Program at California State University, Monterey Bay. 

My career has been marked by prestigious roles, including Director of the Institute for Mexican and Mexico-US Studies, Vice President of the International Oral History Association (IOHA), and Director of the CSU International Program in Spain. Currently, I am collaborating with the Ethnographic Museum of Leon (Museo de los Pueblos Leoneses), where my focus is on cataloguing and organising the Concha Casado Archive for research purposes, in addition to developing the institution’s Oral History Archive.

My research journey has traversed Mexico, the United States, and Spain, providing me with the opportunity to delve into diverse community dynamics and historical events. In Mexico, my attention to rural communities in the State of Queretaro has resulted in several publications on agrarian issues. In California, I have concentrated on studying immigrant communities, particularly through the lens of oral histories from entrepreneurial immigrants. My efforts in Spain have culminated in the compilation of oral histories that reflect the experiences of Spanish return emigrants from the 1960s, work that led to the publication of my book Xente d’Arroxu (Courageous Lives) by the Universidad de Leon.

Anne Heimo

University of Turku, Finland

I first discovered oral history and the Oral History journal in the early 1990s when I was doing my masters’ thesis on 1918 Finnish civil war narratives. At the time oral history was still struggling to find its place in Finnish academia. Today I am Professor of Folkloristics (University of Turku), and I specialise in oral history and cultural memory studies. In addition to oral history research I also study, like many of my colleagues, other forms of personal narratives, e.g. online memories and life writings. I am a founding member and former chair of the Finnish Oral History Network (FOHN). We have had close connections with Oral History over many years and we have also cooperated closely with members of the Oral History Society (UK). Since 2014 I have co-chaired the European Social Science and History Conference (ESSHC) Oral history and life stories network. 

Finnish oral history scholars are very active on the international level. We have authored articles and review pieces in Oral History and will continue to do so. As member of the International Editorial Advisory Board, I keep close contact with colleagues in Finland and elsewhere, especially in the Nordic and Baltic countries, and encourage them to contribute articles and reviews to the journal.

Since the 1990s when oral history research became more known in Finland, Oral History has been a substantial asset for Finnish oral history scholars and students. There is access to the journal in print or in electronic form in several Finnish university libraries as well as some other libraries among them the library of the Finnish Literature Society. Finnish oral historians including Ulla Savolainen, Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen and I worked with Oral History to produce and co-edit one of the journal’s earliest special issues, ‘Nordic-Baltic Oral History’.

Steven High

Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

My name is Steven High and I am the co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2025. We are a vibrant interdisciplinary community of practice which brings together researchers, artists, educators, filmmakers and other digital practitioners, and other community members. 

My main project is the transnational project, ‘Deindustrialization & the Politics of Our Time’ (DePOT – deindustrialization), which brings together the leading research centres, industrial museums, and trade unions in Western Europe and North America. Oral history is our core methodology.

I am very happy to be affiliated with the journal Oral History as it is the single best journal, in my opinion, in the global field.

Daniela Koleva

St Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria

Hello, I am Daniela Koleva, Professor of Oral History and Memory Studies at Sofia University, Department of History and Theory of Culture. My research interests are in the fields of oral history and anthropology of socialism and post-socialism, biographical and cultural memory, politics of memory and heritage, ageing studies, social history of medicine. I have published a monograph on the ‘normal life course’ in communist Bulgaria largely based on oral history. My interest in the everyday life and life course under communism has resulted in a series of edited volumes, one of them international: Negotiating Normality: Everyday Lives in Socialist Institutions (Routledge, 2017). I am co-editor of Ageing, Ritual and Social Change: Comparing the Secular and Religious in Eastern and Western Europe (Ashgate/Routledge, 2013). My latest English-language book is Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past: Public Narratives and Personal Recollections (Palgrave Macmillan 2022)

Robson Laverdi

State University of Ponta Grossa-UEPG, Brazil

I am a historian, and I work as a professor and researcher at the State University of Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil. I teach undergraduate history courses and also participate in the graduate history programme, where I coordinate the Research Centre for Memory, Culture, and Nature. Additionally, I hold the position of Director of Archives and Research at the Campos Gerais Museum. 

My research focuses on Social Memory and Archives, guiding investigations related to oral history, memory, oral sources, public history, as well as exploring the relationships and interactions between culture and nature. I am a researcher at the Centre for the Development and Education of Traditional Yerba Mate Systems – CEDErva and a member researcher of the UNESCO/UFGD Chair on Gender, Cultural Diversity, and Borders. 

I began working with oral history in the year 2000, providing guidance, assistance, and leadership for research in the field of social history of labor and workers, migrations, and socio-environmental themes. Currently, I am collaborating with colleagues in the development of theoretical and methodological approaches for the establishment of an environmental oral history. At the Campos Gerais Museum, I have been actively involved in creating experiences of oral history and public history with a focus on recording the narratives of marginalized social groups.

Cindy Nompilo Ndlovu 

University of Cape Town, South Africa

My name is Dr Nompilo Ndlovu and I am an oral historian. My PhD study focused on the memory and justice initiatives associated with the Gukurahundi violent atrocities in post-colonial Zimbabwe (1982 – 1987). I studied in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town, during which I also worked as an adjunct lecturer. I then held a two-year tenure in the Department as a Postdoctoral Fellow for the Mellon funded History Access programme. During this period, I developed my research focus on ‘languaging’ of past violations. I then extended this work to address counter histories in public life, where legacies of violence are unofficially addressed through public performance and local transitional justice initiatives. Prior to this, I studied and worked as a practitioner within the disciplines of Gender and Development amongst various communities within South Africa, and in other parts of the African continent. I also served with the UNAMID peacekeeping mission in Darfur, Sudan. I am currently completing an Executive Masters in International Relations with the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations (GSD), Switzerland.

I have policy and research affiliations with a variety of institutions such as the South African Commission for Gender Equality, the International Oral History Association, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the ODI, the African Union and the United Nations (Peace and Security apparatus’).

I am an alumnus of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy; the Canon Collins Trust; the African Leadership Centre and the Women’s Funding Network.

Alessandro Portelli

University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy

I have been working on oral history since the founding of the Circolo Gianni Bosio for critical study and alternative presence of people’s cultures in the 1970s, which I still chair. My work available in English includes The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Form and meaning in oral history (1981), The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History as an art of dialogue (1997), The Order has been carried out: History, Memory and meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (2003), They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (2011), Biography of an Industrial Town: Terni 1821-2014(2017). My most recent book is Dal rosso al nero: La svolta a destra di una città operaia (From Red to Black: A Working-class Town’ Turn to the Right, 2023).

Alistair Thomson

Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

I am an Emeritus Professor in History at Monash University in Australia and President of Oral History Australia. Previously I was President of the International Oral History Association, Professor of Oral History at the University of Sussex and an editor of the journal Oral History (1991-2007). My oral history books include: Anzac Memories (1994 and 2013), The Oral History Reader (1998, 2006 and 2015 with Robert Perks), Ten Pound Poms (2005, with Jim Hammerton), Moving Stories: An intimate history of four women across two countries (2011), Oral History and Photography (2011, with Alexander Freund), Australian Lives:  An Intimate History (2017, with Anisa Puri) and the co-authored Australian Fathering 1919-2019 (forthcoming).