Biography of Dr. Rob Perks

Dr Robert Perks has been Lead Curator of Oral History at the British Library since 1988, and Director of National Life Stories since 1996. He heads a team of some twenty staff involved in oral history fieldwork in a variety of sectors: from arts and crafts to business and finance, from the utilities to science, from architecture to publishing. He is the Secretary of the Oral History Society, a Visiting Professor at the University of Huddersfield, an editor of Oral History: The Journal of the Oral History Society and Series Editor of the Oxford University Press Oral History Series.

He acts as an advisor to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the Centre for Life History Research at the University of Sussex, the Australian Generations national oral history project (Monash University Melbourne), and the Canadian Oral History Centre at the University of Winnipeg. He is a previous Council Member of the International Oral History Association. Between 2002 and 2007 he was a Board Member of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council South East (MLAC-SE).

His publications include The Oral History Reader (Routledge, 1998, second edition 2006, third edition in preparation), Oral History, Health and Welfare (Routledge, 2000), Ukraine's Forbidden History (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1998), and numerous audio publications including Voices of the Holocaust: a cross-curricular resource pack (British Library, 1993), now available as a web-based resource.

As a Winston Churchill Fellow he researched nationalism, memory and oral history in Eastern Europe, and has acted as a special historical advisor for the Council of Europe in Romania. He was Co-ordinator of the Millennium Oral History Project, a collaborative initiative between the British Library and BBC Regional Broadcasting, and the largest oral history project ever mounted in Britain. Currently he co-ordinates the BL's relationship with the BBC for "The Listening Project" airing four times weekly on BBC Radio 4. In 2007 he was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Huddersfield in recognition of his work in the field.