Professor Margaretta Jolly
Centre Director
Email: M.Jolly@sussex.ac.uk
About us
Learn about our history and meet the people who contribute to the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research.
Our history
Life history and life writing research uses life story – whether in the form of oral history, personal narrative, autobiography or biography – as a primary source for the study of history and culture. Life stories capture the relationship between the individual and society, the local and the national, the past and present, and the public and private experience.
Research involves grappling with theories of memory, relationship and self-representation, with debates about literacy and orality. Many disciplines contribute to the field, including history, sociology, anthropology, literary philosophy, cultural studies and psychology.
Life history and life writing researchers present their work in many forms. As well as academic publications, we contribute to radio and television documentaries, auto/biographical drama, reminiscence work, digital and video presentations and exhibitions. Life history and life writing research is concerned with ethics and power relationships, and with the potential for advocacy and empowerment.
Established in 1999, the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research aims to:
- highlight University of Sussex experience and expertise in the field of life history and life writing research, both within the University and beyond
- link the theory and methods of oral history with the analysis and practice of life writing
- provide an institutional forum for Sussex faculty who have a research interest in these fields, encourage synergy from present activities, and provide a democratic forum for further development
- establish institutional links with like-minded research centres in Britain and overseas
- seek funding for life history and life writing research projects and events
- facilitate University of Sussex recruitment of postgraduate students in the field of life history and life writing research
- support community, business, humanitarian and governmental initiatives of relevance, typically in memory-based heritage.
Learn about useful resources in the field of Life History and Life Writing.
Meet our people
Meet the Directors of the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, as well as the academics, PhD students and Visiting Fellows who have all contributed to our work.
- Directors
Founding directors
Professor Dorothy Sheridan was the Director of the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) between 1990 to 2008 and is an Honorary Professor of History at Sussex.
Professor Alistair Thomson, was a Professor of Oral History at Sussex and is now Professor of History at Monash University.
- Academics with interests in life narrative
Dr Jamie Barnes (Senior Lecturer in Sociology)
Professor Hester Barron (Professor of Modern History)
Professor Joanna Callaghan (Professor of Filmmaking)
Dr Sam Carroll (Research Associate)
Dr Fiona Courage (Deputy Director of Library Culture and Heritage and Director of the Mass Observa)
Professor Sara Crangle (Professor of Modernism and the Avant-Garde)
Dr Flora Dennis (Professor of Cultural History)
Dr John Doyle (Senior Lecturer in Digital and Multimedia Journalism)
Vincent Du (Lecturer in Filmmaking)
Professor Ivor Gaber (Professor of Political Journalism)
Dr Adrian Goycoolea (Senior Lecturer)
Professor David Hendy
Professor Ben Highmore (Professor of Cultural Studies)
Dr Tanya Kant (Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies)
Professor Tim Hitchcock
Dr Wendy Hitchmough
Dr Jill Kirby (Senior Lecturer in History)
Dr Laura Kounine (Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History)
Professor Alisa Lebow (Professor of Screen Media)
Dr Mark Leopold
Dr Alexandra Loske
Dr Liz McDonnell (Senior Lecturer)
Laura Maynard (Research Student)
Dr Jonathan Moss (Senior Lecturer in Politics)
Dr Emma Newport (Senior Lecturer in English Literature)
Dr Jacob Norris (Senior Lecturer in Middle East History)
Professor Kate O’Riordan (Pro Vice Chancellor for Education and Students)
Jeremy Page
Kirsty Pattrick
Dr Joanne Paul
Professor Lucy Robinson (Professor in Collaborative History)
Professor Ben Rogaly (Professor of Human Geography)
Dr Charlie Rumsby (Lecturer in Childhood and Youth)
Dr Madhushala Senaratne
Professor Darrow Schecter (Professor of Critical Theory and Modern European History)
Dr Rachel Stenner (Reader in Literature and Print Culture)
Professor Lyn Thomas
Professor Rachel Thomson (Professor of Childhood & Youth Studies)
Professor Lizzie Thynne (Professor of Film)
Dr Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden (Professor of Digital Memory)
John Walker (Senior Lecturer)
Dr Alban Webb (Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies)
Dr Russell Whiting (Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Care)
Dr Zoha Zokaei (Lecturer in Media Practice)
- Associated PhD students (including doctoral thesis)
Tamar Angel (2014) – "How much can a bridge carry?" An analysis of the life stories of Arab Israeli citizen bibliotherapists
Ângela da Conceição Ferreira Campos (2014) – Shifting silence, enduring shame, ambivalent memories: an oral history of the Portuguese colonial war (1961 – 1974)
Laura Catherine Cofield (2021) – After Shave: a Cultural History of Female Body Hair Removal in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Britain
Helen Dixon – Creative life writing; feminism; Nicaraguan/South American studies
Carol Grose – White Evangelical Women, the Changing South, and the Wider World, 1920 to 1949
Emilia Halton-Hernandez (2021) – Marion Milner’s autobiographical cure
Rose Holmes (2015) – A moral business: British Quaker work with refugees from fascism, 1933-39
Emily Lalande – Royal biography, life-writing of sixteenth-century Navarrese queens consort
Hannah Ludikhuijze (2024) – The Literary Voluntourist: Revisiting NGO Reading Practices in Rural Malawi
Haley Moyse-Fenning – Gender and the Towner Art Gallery
Nicola Plowman (2017) – A cultural history of feminist cartoons and comics in Britain from 1970 to 2010
Emily Priscott (2023) – Singleness in Britain, 1960-1990: identity, gender and social change
Alison Ramsey – “Changing ‘the change”: Representations of menopause on screen”
Una Richmond (2023) – “No second sex in art”: the Women’s International Art Club, 1950-1978
Rosalchen Whitecross (2021) – Wallflowers have eyes too - a critical engagement with women writing in prison and their narratives of lived experience
Adam Whitehall – Psychogeography, film; Lead for New Pathways project
- Visiting Fellows
Hannah Ludikhuijze (2025)
Hannah Davita Ludikhuijze has recently finished her PhD in literature and anthropology at the University of Sussex in the UK, funded by CHASE. Her thesis considered whether literature and life-writing might help to improve the practice of volunteer tourism in Malawi, particularly in re-orientating voluntourists’ perceptions away from exotic pre-conceived ideas about ‘the Other’. In doing so, she problematised mechanisms of knowledge acquisition in Malawi’s (literary) and oral history and what pedagogical frameworks might foster reading to complicate, rather than confirm assumptions. One of her current creative projects is to see how a reading group programme for ‘the literary voluntourist’ can be co-created for NGOs in Malawi.
Her writing has been published in Storying the Self: Performance and Communities (2022) and she has taught extensively in both the School of Media, Arts and Humanities and the School of Global Studies. She has been affiliated with the CLHLWR throughout, and is keen to explore further collaborations. Hannah is originally from the Netherlands.
Peter Robinson (2025)
Dr. Peter Robinson is Associate Professor at Japan Women's University in the Department of English. He gained his MA and PhD in Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought at Sussex, and has lectured and written extensively on garden history and the history of Sussex. Most recently, he delivered a two-part lecture on the botanical illustrator and designer Sugiura Hisui for the Gardens Trust. Based in Japan for more than 15 years, Peter has held appointments at leading universities including: The University of Tokyo, Keio University, and Waseda University. In 2016 he co-conceived a Heritage Lottery-funded literary outreach project a 'Southdowns Alphabet' (with June Goodfield), involving local schools and the U3A. Following this, in 2017, he sole-curated a large exhibition at the University of Tokyo's Komaba Museum, 'Novelists and Newspapers: The Golden Age of Newspaper Fiction, 1900-1939'. His most recent publication is the co-edited volume, Competing Imperialisms in Northeast Asia: New Perspectives 1894-1953.
Peter is delighted to be returning to Sussex and joining the CLHLWR as a Visiting Research Fellow where he will be investigating the role Sussex gardens and their workforce have played in helping to build and strengthen communities and create distinctive horticultural patination. In his spare time, based on his own garden lodged 800 metres above sea level on the side of an active volcano, he is working on a book exploring the meeting of two cultures through the lens of horticulture in the context of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Rosalind Eyben (2022-2025)
Most of my life I have worked in international development practice and policy that I describe in my reflexive memoir, International Aid and the Making of a Better World (2014). After retiring from the Institute of Development Studies my life writing moved in a new direction with a dissertation for an MA in British social history about the lives of Brighton’s immigrants at the turn of the 19th/20th Century, including waiters. Three journal articles resulted from further research into their lives: why waiters in upper class restaurants were banned from growing moustaches; the insalubrious career of a syndicalist waiter and con man; and a waitresses’ tea-shop strike supported by the suffragist Women’s Freedom League.
In April 2024, Routledge’s Radical Politics and History series published a biography of my father, a trade union leader and politician that was developed while at the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research. John Horner and the Communist Party, Uncomfortable Encounters with Truth is for anyone concerned with the problem of political allegiance, personal morality and associated states of denial that were to haunt my father in later life. I am now researching at the Centre for a book about the life of Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, a Christian Socialist and pacifist who was imprisoned during the First World War for campaigning against military conscription.
Simon von Büren (2018/19)
Simone von Büren is a critic and a lecturer at the Swiss Literature Institute and also the theatre department of Berne University of the Arts HKB. Her visit was funded by the Swiss–European Mobility Programme.
As a dramaturg she has worked in opera, among others with director Christof Loy (Alceste, Aix-en-Provence 2010), and in contemporary devised theatre with several Swiss theatre companies and choirs for whom she often wrote texts. She has collaborated with the composer Christian Henking on a staged composition based on poetry and letters by Austrian poet Georg Trakl (“In eines Spiegels Bläue”, Basel, February 2019). And she has worked with artist Mats Staub on his long-term project Death and Birth in my Life.
She is interested in co-authorship and unstable dramaturgies in contemporary performances of biography.Phyliss Dannhauser (2018/19)
I am a lecturer in the Department of Journalism, Film and Television at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. My recently completed PhD is an autoethnography of using storytelling and filmmaking to overcome marginalisation in both social and academic contexts. I was pleased and honoured to have been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Life History and Life Writing during the Spring term of 2018. My research is in the area of ethnographic and social documentaries, and the use of storytelling and filmmaking to initiate social change.
During my time at the University of Sussex, I collaborated with researchers and staff in School of Media, Film and Music, and CLHLWR to investigate how marginalised people can be included in the filmmaking process. I was particularly interested in working with students and staff in the Masters modules on First Person Film and the Masters in Media for Development and Social Change. By running collaborative workshops, meeting colleagues and investigating the special collections at CLHLWR I was able to investigate how different cultures approach the use of personal narrative in filmmaking and academic environments. This research was supported by a Researcher Links grant, ID 2017-RLTG9-10748, under the South Africa Newton Fund partnership. The grant is funded by the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the South African Department of Higher Education and Training, and delivered by the British Council.
Dr Jenna Bailey (2014/15)
After completing my doctorate at the University of Sussex I was incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to become a Visiting Research Fellow with the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research (CLHLWR). Having been a member of the centre in a different capacity prior to my fellowship, I was aware of the important and fascinating work being conducted by the members of the centre and the fellowship allowed me the opportunity to remain connected to such a vibrant community of scholars.
During my time I gave lectures at the University of Sussex, the University of Lethbridge in Canada, the International Association for Biography and Autobiography (IABA): Autobiography in Transit Conference in Banff, Canada, the Northeast Conference on British Studies in Maine, USA, the North American British Music Studies Association Conference in Las Vegas, USA, and the AHRC funded Value of Women’s Work Workshop in Florence, Italy. I was also guest expert on BBC's Radio 2's Programme "Sax Appeal: Ivy Benson's All Girl Band". Since then I have had an autobiographical essay published in a Faber collection entitled A Grief Observed Reader’s Edition (2015) alongside works by noted writers C.S. Lewis, Hilary Mantel, Francis Spufford and Dr. Rowan Williams. As I work toward the completion of my second monograph, Ivy Benson’s Music School For Girls, 1940-c.1985, I have been truly grateful to have the support and connection to the CLHLWR.
Dr Anne Byrne (2012)
Senior Lecturer, School of Political Science and Sociology, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. Dr Anne Byrne spent a month at Sussex, working on her project Writing to Nancy, writing to Leonard (1943-1968). This project considered the letters between Nancy Nolan and Leonard Woolf, publisher, political theorist, civil servant and husband to Virginia Woolf. During her time at Sussex she consulted letters and other papers by Leonard Woolf in Special Collections of University of Sussex Library, now located at The Keep.
Dr. Anu-Hanna Anttila (2010)
Senior Researcher (Academy of Finland), Department of Sociology, University of Turku, Finland.Dr Anttila carried out a month's research at the Mass Observation Archive as part of her research project Rethinking Work-Leisure Distinctions: Towards a More Sensitive Theory?
Prof. Belkis Kumbetoglu (2010)
Marmara University, Faculty of Science and Letter, Department of Sociology, Ziverbey/Kadiloy, Istanbul, Turkey.Prof. Belkis Kumbetoglu visited Sussex for three months in the autumn of 2010, primarily to work on a book, Qualitative Methodology: Different Perspectives, Debates and Issues.
Contact
If you have any questions, you can email:
- Professor Margaretta Jolly (Centre Director): M.Jolly@sussex.ac.uk
- Dr Alexandra Loske (Associate Director): A.Loske@sussex.ac.uk
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