Postgraduate Study
History at Huddersfield

MA Oral History

Entry requirements

Normally a good undergraduate degree

Entry requirements

One year full-time; Two or three years part-time

Contact

Interested in the history of ordinary people and their everyday lives?

Interested in talking to people?

Interested in ensuring people’s voices are heard in the academic record?

Oral history enables us to eavesdrop on aspects of life often left out of the historical record. This MA will train you in the skills to become an advanced oral historian – in fields including leisure, ethnicity, and local and regional history – that will enable you reconstruct aspects of people’s lives.

The MA Oral History can be taken one-year full-time or part-time over two years (90 credits a year) or three years (60 credits a year).  It is taught jointly by History and Media and Journalism, building on substantial research in oral history by both teams. It begins with a core module introducing you to advanced historical study, including oral history. You take a module on the oral history of twentieth-century Britain and there are also modules to teach you the technical and methodological skills needed for oral history projects. Finally, there is a dissertation.

The 3-year route is ideal for those in full-time work or who want to take the MA for purposes of personal interest, to explore the oral history of their community, for example.

The dissertation in oral history is innovative and flexible. You will conduct a number of oral history interviews around a theme that you have devised. You will summarise, edit and transcribe the interviews as necessary in order to communicate your research findings, and produce an analytical commentary on the methodologies and conclusions of your research. All students will carry out interviews and then shape and edit those interviews as collected data. Each student will then have two options. One option will be to produce a relevant media outcome to communicate the findings of your research to a non-academic audience, such as a website, pamphlet or exhibition, and to produce a 4,000 word commentary and analysis. The second option will be to produce a 9,000 word dissertation based on your interviews. This makes the course suitable for both practising oral historians and those wishing to pursue further academic research.

While the MA Oral History is new and distinctive, it builds on the strengths of already existing MA History, allowing students to take advantage of the experience of a successful MA on the one hand while participating in the fresh and exciting area of oral history on the other.

The MA is taught by a team whose submission to the Research Assessment Exercise in 2008 was considered to be 90 per cent internationally recognized, internationally excellent or world-leading. The MA Oral History seeks also to build on the substantial new strengths associated with the Centre for Oral History Research in the Journalism and Media Subject Area of the School of Music, Humanities and Media. Among recent oral history are ones on rugby league in West Yorkshire, the Asian community in Kirklees, the two minutes silence, British views of Hollywood, and the yeomen warders and the Tower of London. The MA Oral History forms a central part of the Centre’s functions. Oral History at Huddersfield has secured more than £170,000 in funding from outside the School.

Course Structure

It is intended that the course structure will be:

Part-time 2 Years

Year 1

All year

• The Methodology and Practice of Oral History (30 credits)

Autumn term

Spring term

Year 2

Autumn term

Spring and summer terms

Teaching and Assessment

For part-time students teaching is on one evening each week, from 5.15 to 7.15 pm, often with an additional hour of teaching interaction on the Web, using the University’s ‘Blackboard’ virtual learning environment. The Methodology and Practice of Oral History module is taught through a number of workshops on the practical skills of oral history. Full time students will attend on two evenings in term 1, between 5.15 and 7.15. In term 2 they take another module and the workshops. You will be taught alongside students on the successful MA in History, on which the student body is diverse, usually pretty evenly balanced between men and women, with ages ranging from the twenties to the sixties. A wide range of assessments is used, including both written work and oral presentations, there are no formal examinations. Work on the dissertation is directly supervised by an individual member of the History or Media and Journalism staff, on a one-to-one basis.

Career Opportunities

Useful Links

www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/history.html The British Library Sound Archive Oral History

www.ohs.org.uk/index.php The Oral History Society