Journal

The Journal of the Oral History Society

Oral History is the oldest and also the only independent journal publishing articles and news from oral historians in the UK and around the world. It has remained consistently at the forefront of oral history debates and developments in theory and practice since founded by Paul Thompson and colleagues in 1969. Oral History has published articles by leading oral historians and has pushed boundaries and opened up new areas in debates about memory and public history, inter-generational understanding and cultural transmission, trauma, gender, race and ethnicity, inter/subjectivity, conflict and reconciliation. Subscription to Oral History is included in Oral History Society membership – for more details please click here.

The editorial group welcomes submissions from a wide range of disciplines where the significance of oral history, orality, personal testimony and remembering is understood, valued and debated. This includes academics from the humanities and social sciences, archivists, social workers, journalists working in print and new media, health and community workers, educationalists, librarians, photographers, visual artists and museum curators. The journal’s editorial policy is to sustain a lively and critical understanding of the importance of oral history for the past, present and the future.

Abstracting and Open Access

Oral History is abstracted here and in: International Bibliography of the Social Sciences and at ZETOC (Electronic Table of Contents from the British Library) at http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/

Like other history journals, Oral History is monitoring the emerging situation around Open Access and Plan S compliance. As the October 2019 Royal Historical Society document on this matter makes clear (see https://royalhistsoc.org/policy/publication-open-access/) UKRI’s policy for implementation of Open Access remains sketchy. Oral History and its editors are constantly monitoring this situation. The current policy of the journal complies with current requirements at UK HE institutions around REF and open access. The journal supplies authors with PDF copies of their accepted manuscripts before publication and these can be uploaded to the author’s institutional repository.

Interested in contributing?

Information for authors interested in submitting articles is available at:

http://www.ohs.org.uk/wordpress/journal/information-for-authors

We welcome proposals for special thematic issues for our journal. Please see guidance here.

Archive

Back issues of the journal, going back to 1972, are available to order or are freely available and downloadable via JSTOR to individual and institutional members.

Reviews

We are interested in expanding our reviews section to include not only books but also films, radio and television programmes, theatre, exhibitions, performances, podcasts, public history projects, and new media. Publishers, authors, artists, educators, as well as would-be reviewers, please send your suggestions to the reviews editors Fearghus Roulston and Isabel Machado at ohjreviews@gmail.com.

News items

News of projects and initiatives using oral history should be sent to Cynthia Brown (cb@cydfx.net) for British items or to Siobhan Warrington (siobhan@oraltestimony.org) for International items.

Advertising

Publisher specifications for advertising in Oral History can be downloaded as a PDF by clicking here.

For enquiries about advertising contact Liz Ison: journals@ohs.org.uk

Editorial team:

Founder editor Paul Thompson (University of Essex)

Issue editors

  • Joanna Bornat (The Open University)
  • Lindsey Dodd (University of Huddersfield)
  • Jenny Harding (London Metropolitan University)
  • Heather Norris Nicholson (University of Huddersfield)
  • Sean O’Connell (Queen’s University, Belfast)
  • Rob Perks (The British Library)
  • Anindya Raychaudhuri (University of St Andrews)
  • Christine Wall (University of Westminster)

Current British Work Editor

  • Cynthia Brown

International Work Editor

  • Siobhan Warrington (Oral Testimony Works)

Learning Editor

  • Kate Melvin

Public History

  • Abigail Hunt (University of Lincoln)
  • George Severs (University of Cambridge)

Reviews Editors

  • Isabel Machado (University of Memphis)
  • Fearghus Roulston (University of Brighton)

Editorial Assistant

  • Liz Ison

International Editorial Advisory Board

  • Riki van Boeschoten (University of Thessaly, Greece)
  • Indira Chowdhury (Srishti School of Art, Design and Tecnology, Bengaluru, India)
  • Elizabeth Dore (University of Southampton)
  • Sean Field (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
  • Alexander Freund (University of Winnipeg, Canada)
  • Anna Green (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
  • Juan J Gutierrez (California State University, USA)
  • Steven High (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada)
  • Daniela Koleva (St Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria)
  • Ulla-Maija Peltonen (University of Helsinki, Finland)
  • Alessandro Portelli (University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy)
  • Alistair Thomson (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia)
  • Miroslave Vanek (Czech Academy of Science, Prague, Czech Republic)

Reprint Permissions

We are happy to consider requests to reprint articles from Oral History in another publication.