Meet our Trustees

Chair

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!

Secretary

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

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 network representative 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 was initially employed as a Welsh language dialect researcher, when the museum was still known as the Welsh Folk Museum. I then worked there as a 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 reimagining 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. If you are in Wales and would like advice or training in oral history, 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.

Regional Network Co-ordinator

Juliana Vandegrift

I’m a Trustee of the Oral History Society and the Coordinator of the Regional Network and representative 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. 

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, a Regional Networker, and a British Library National Sound Archive/Oral History Society trainer.

Trustee

Cynthia Brown

I am a Trustee of the Oral History Society, one of its Accredited Trainers, and a Regional Network representative for Leicestershire and Rutland. I also edit the Current British Work section of Oral History, the Society’s journal. 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 continue to teach modern British history and local history to adult students alongside my involvement in the Oral History Society.

Deputy Regional Network Co-ordinator

Padmini Broomfield

An OHS trustee since 2009, I am Deputy Coordinator of the Regional Network and representative 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

Michelle Winslow

My roles within the OHS are Trustee, Regional Network Representative (South Yorkshire), Accredited Trainer and Website Officer. I teach public health subjects and oral history in palliative care in the Division of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Sheffield. I have worked on numerous palliative care and end of life research studies and in 2007 established an oral history project as a service for patients in a Palliative Care Unit in Sheffield. This project continues to offer patients an opportunity to create life history recordings as personal and family records and for research. I also lead an Oral History Group which focuses on oral history research in healthcare and collaborates with care providers in establishing new oral history projects. Key to this work has been the development of a bespoke training and development programme for hospices and palliative care centres.

Trustee

Erin Farley

I am the Library & Information Officer for Local History at Dundee Libraries, where we hold a large and varied collection including print, manuscripts, photographs and oral histories from the city’s history. I’ve worked on academic and community oral history research projects in the past, and have been lucky enough to interview lighthouse keepers, craft workers and storytellers among many others. I am particularly interested in projects about people’s work and creative lives, and the importance of place. I am currently working on conserving and sharing the existing oral histories in our library collections, and am looking forward to expanding Dundee oral history collections in the future too. You can get in touch with me via email or Twitter.

Trustee

Fiona Cosson