Professor Shelley Trower,
Principal Investigator

Shelley Trower works in the School of Humanities at the University of Roehampton. Current research interests include reading, oral history, memory and forgetting, developed through Memories of Fiction: An Oral History of Readers’ Lives (2014-2018), and now Living Libraries (2019-2020).

Books include Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History (2011), Senses of Vibration (2012), and Rocks of Nation (2015). Recent publications include ‘Interviews and Reading’, a coedited section of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies (2019) and ‘Forgetting Fiction: An Oral History of Reading’, Book History (forthcoming 2020). She is currently working on Sound Writing, contracted with Oxford University Press.

Shelley’s nascent love of libraries developed when listening to people talk about the multitude of ways they’ve benefitted from them, from childhood to the present. At around the same time, having children reunited her with a local public library: Upper Norwood Library (South London) became somewhere to take them on long rainy days... She has now just remembered also going to the library to get some quiet space away from her family to work, and finishing the bid for this very project in the library cafe.

Has possibly never witnessed such uncontrollable public laughter as at a performance last year from the comedian Mark Steel at a fundraising event supporting that library’s survival.

Dr Sarah Pyke,
Impact and Engagement Officer

Sarah is a postdoc at the University of Roehampton, working on queer book use and reading and the spaces and places of reading and book culture. Her recently completed PhD draws on oral history interviews with LGBTQ adults to ask how childhood and adolescent reading, and experiences-with-books more broadly, contribute to queer self-fashioning. Before her re-entry into academia, she worked for ten years in communications and campaigns for various NGOs, human rights and arts organisations. Her first memories of public libraries are of visiting with her mum in the mid-eighties: the small Browne issue cards, the high counter, and the sound of the librarian’s stamp.

Alison Chand,
Archive Administrator

Alison Chand is a tutor at the Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde, and a lecturer in History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. She also works as a freelance oral historian in various interviewing, transcribing, advisory and training capacities. Alison summarised all the 100+ interviews for Memories of Fiction and Living Libraries.

Clara Manasian Cook,
Volunteer

Clara Cook is a podcaster, oral history interviewer and university administrator. In recent years, she has worked on oral history projects including These Dangerous Women for WILPF, Tales from Houghton Street (to mark LSE's 120th anniversary) and ST40 for Spare Tyre Theatre. She hosts her own podcast about women and gender in film, TV and fiction called The Tales We Tell.

Bryan Tully, Volunteer

Bryan Tully is a semi-retired clinical and forensic psychologist. He now facilitates older people conducting their Life Reviews with a view to preventing "narrative foreclosure" in later life.  He is also researching geronto-ludic aspects of table-top and videogames, i.e. those features which pertain to the particular abilities and playfulness of older people.

The Living Libraries oral histories are archived by National Life Stories at the British Library Sound Archive.

Thanks to Rob, Mary, Camille and Charlie for invaluable support.