Mission Statement
The Oral History Review is a biannual, peer-reviewed journal that publishes significant original research, and book and media reviews. We seek articles that offer new insights into oral history practice, methodology, theory, and pedagogy. We are particularly interested in articles that move beyond project descriptions to bring transferable lessons, thus advancing our understanding of oral history and the people we work with. We welcome submissions from all scholarly disciplines, as well as professional and community realms, that engage directly and deeply with oral history. Reflecting the international scope of oral history as a field, we invite submissions from authors around the world and on national, regional, transnational, and global topics. The Oral History Review is published by the Oral History Association.
The Review seeks work that falls into and across the following areas:
Theory
Oral history theory concerns frameworks that help us to better understand memory, inter/subjectivity, positionality, identity, power, and other persistent issues in the field.
Pedagogy
The Review also supports articles that focus on pedagogy, which has proven to be a dynamic and engaged area of investigation, experimentation, exploration, and analysis in the Review. Pedagogy is the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject, but also as a theoretical concept. Such work includes, but is not limited to, lessons from instructors at all levels of education, student experiences with oral history training or projects, and comparative findings from community workshops.
Practice
Survey Articles
Survey articles serve as a kind of “state of the field” essay. They explore the evolution and/or current role of oral history in, for example, a specific location (e.g., a city, country, or region); an adjacent field (e.g., anthropology or museology); or in a project or projects that consider the oral history of a community, institution or governmental agency–or a comparison study across institutions or agencies.
Applied Oral History
These articles extract broad lessons from specific projects that all oral history practitioners can learn from. Examples include, but are not limited to, oral history projects that result in changes in government/institutional policy, are scalable, or can otherwise serve as a model.
From the Archives
“From the Archives” is an occasional feature in which authors analyze an archival oral history collection in terms of the original goals of a project and collection, as well as the collection’s historical value, accessibility, and its use–or usefulness–in secondary research.
Hybrid
Generally, the Review seeks work that falls into as well as across the above categories as most article submissions do not fall neatly into one of them. Authors should let what they have to say drive their choice of form.
To submit to the Oral History Review, visit the Article Submissions Guidelines page.
OHA Membership & OHR
OHA members receive digital access to the current and past issues (back to 1973) of The Oral History Review. Members can also opt in to receive print issues of the journal twice a year.
- Individual Members
- Online access to the journal is available to individual members through the OHA member website. Members log in and select the OHR Online tab on the member menu to reach the OHR archive hosted by Routledge, Taylor & Francis. To join and receive the journal, visit the OHA member website.
- Institutional Subscribers
- Online access to the journal is available to institutional subscribers on the Routledge website.
