Meet our Trustees

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.

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.

Membership Officer

Emily Gibbs

I have been a Trustee since 2018 and I am responsible for the Membership of the Oral History Society. I first became interested in oral history through my PhD at the University of Liverpool which was funded by the NWCDTP. My research focused on the ways in which local, urban communities experienced, represented and expressed ‘nuclear anxiety’ in the UK between 1952 and 1989 using the stories and memories of civilians. Specifically, my work was interested in oral history, history of emotions, memory, and regional/national identities. I was also involved in the “Brews and Brows” collaborative project which investigated the evolution of the eyebrow in contemporary culture. I was successful in obtaining a UKRI-funded placement at the National Library of Scotland, working on a project which explored the impact of the Data Protection Act 2018 on archiving. I am currently employed in records and knowledge management in the NHS.

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

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.

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, work on our allotment and be involved in local campaigning.

Nominations Subcommittee Convenor

Verusca Calabria

I am an Early Career Research Fellow in the department of Social Work, School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University. My PhD thesis, entitled “Oral Histories of the Nottinghamshire Mental Hospitals” (2020), explored the changing dimension of care practices from the mental hospital to community care by co-producing the oral histories of former patients and retired staff. My research expertise include oral history, participatory-action-research, psychosocial approaches to mental health and service-user involvement. I am also an oral history and heritage consultant. My current oral history project entitled Memories of Mental Health Care aims to explore and preserve the social history of Nottingham mental health provision. Some of the oral history projects I have led in the past include the Environment Trust’s Jam Yesterday Jam Tomorrow, the Wellcome Trust One and Other fourth-plinth collection, Belonging in Brent, Memories from Emilia Romagna and Sicily.

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.

Treasurer

Titi Faluyi

I am an experienced Accountant with a demonstrated history of working in the financial services industry. I am skilled in Business Planning, Accounting, Business Analysis, Finance, and Financial Analysis. Professional accountant who has worked voluntarily with charitable organisations.

Trustee

Malcolm Cowburn

I was appointed as a Trustee in 2021. I am Professor Emeritus in Applied Social Science at Sheffield Hallam University. Throughout my academic career I have retained an interest in qualitative research methodologies (my doctoral study used life histories), and research ethics. From 2014 to 2019 I held a Visiting Professorship at Plymouth University, during which time I conducted a small oral history study of North Devon Magistrates (Cowburn, M. (2019) “‘Local Justice needs local knowledge’: summary justice in North Devon, 1975-2018”. The Journal of Oral History, 47 (2) pp74-85). In 2018, I was appointed as a freelance oral historian for the North Devon Beaford Hidden Histories project. Between 2019 and 2020 I was a member of the OHS’s Governance Working Party Sounding Board. My particular interests are in diversity, the methodology of oral history, and improving access to and greater use of existing oral history recordings. 

Trustee

Jennifer Vickers

I currently work at Touchstones Museum and Art Gallery where I manage the creative learning programme. This involves working with schools and communities to explore art and heritage through a range of projects and workshops. I originally trained in Fine Art and have made artworks for collections at the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. As an artist, I am interested in how personal memories differ from the collective memory we see displayed in public monuments, museums and the media.

I became interested in oral history as an undergraduate when I interviewed first my grandmother, and then a group of retired servicemen from the Crete Veterans Association. After completing an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies I enrolled on an introduction to Oral History course with the OHS. I have since managed oral history projects for a wide range of organisations including Museums Sheffield, The Lowry, Gallery Oldham, Buddleia and The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust.

I was employed on consecutive projects by the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust and went on to develop their oral history training programme and collections strategy. I also co-authored an introductory toolkit aimed at groups embarking on their first oral history project. This work was rooted in the desire to support people who have experienced racism to record, share and archive their experiences. Research and development led to a large-scale grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to identify gaps, increase representation and strengthen community infrastructure. The project known as Coming in From the Cold was a finalist at the Manchester Culture Awards and featured as a case study on Diversity and inclusion by the National Archives in their annual review in 2020.

Trustee

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.