Having started the oral history interviews last October, we’ve now met with seven reading groups from the Wandsworth area from whom we’ve talked with a total of 25 people. We wish to thank all the reading groups for making us welcome and for fascinating discussions and insights, and especially those who have volunteered to talk further. Each person agreed to be interviewed twice so we’ve gathered a great range of in-depth conversations about reading, and many of these interviews are now being made available on the University of Roehampton project website. I wish to thank Amy for all the thought and work she has put into carrying out the interviews with great skill, and the two excellent archive administrators, Alison Chand and Haley Moyse Fenning, who are completing interview summaries, listing all authors and books mentioned, for example, which are also available on the website to help navigate the interviews.
We are also involved in organising the next Oral History Society conference, to be held at the University of Roehampton 8-9 July 2016, entitled ‘Beyond Text in the Digital Age? Oral History, Images and the Written Word’. The Call for Papers is now available for which proposals for papers, panels, presentations, workshops, posters and displays are very welcome. We’re delighted to have the following keynote speakers offering talks at the conference: Mary Larson (Oklahoma State University), Alessandro Portelli (University of Rome), and Anne Valk (Brown University).
In other news, we’re happy to have been invited to speak about the project for the Oral History Society seminar series at the Institute of Historical Research on Thursday 5 November, and at the University of Bournemouth on Wednesday 11 November. Our talks for both occasions will be entitled ‘“She used to get lost in a book”: Approaching gendered reading through two archives (Memories of Fiction and 100 Families)’. For these talks we will introduce our project and discuss the article we’ve been working on, aimed at the Oral History journal. For this article we’ve revisited a large oral history project on which Graham Smith was a major contributor in the 1980s, called 100 Families. In contrast to our project where we are seeking out people with a clear interest in reading (members of reading groups), these interviewees rarely identify as ‘readers’ and give us a chance to explore how reading plays a role across a range of generations and social classes. The topic of reading is a relatively small part of the 100 Families interviews: just a few of the many questions concern reading – eg. asking whether there were books in the house as a child and whether parents read to children. We’ve used NVivo to analyse these interview transcripts and will discuss how such a programme can be used to analyse such material, with a focus on reading and gender as a detailed case study.
Memories of Fiction: An Oral History 