Mary Chamberlain (born 3 September 1947) is a British novelist and historian. She has been largely collected by libraries worldwide. [1]
Mary Chamberlain (born 3 September 1947) is a British novelist and historian. She has been largely collected by libraries worldwide. [1]
Chamberlain was born 3 September 1947 in South London, [2] and holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh, The London School of Economics and Political Science, and Royal Holloway, University of London.
She is married to the political scientist Stein Ringen. [3] Chamberlain was previously married to Carey Harrison. [4]
Chamberlain is Emeritus Professor of History, at Oxford Brookes University. [5] Her book Fenwomen. Portrait of Women in an English Village was the first book published by Virago Press in 1975, [6] and pioneered the use of oral history in the study of women’s history. It was also the inspiration for the Joint Stock production of Caryl Churchill’s award-winning play Fen (1983). [7] Fenwomen was followed by two further books on women’s history: Old Wives’ Tales: Their History, Remedies and Spells and Growing Up In Lambeth.
From 1987 to 1991, she lived in Barbados, and began working in Caribbean history. Using oral history, she published two pioneering studies of migration and families, Narratives of Exile and Return [8] and Family Love in the Diaspora: Migration and the Anglo Caribbean Experience, [9] and a further study of decolonization, Empire and Nation-building in the Caribbean: Barbados 1937–1966. [10]
Chamberlain is widely considered one of the founders of oral history, [11] was the reviews editor of the Oral History Journal from 1977 to 1987 and co-founder of the London History Workshop Centre. [12] She is the author of many articles on women's history, oral history and Caribbean history, has edited a number of books, and was a founding editor or the series Memory and Narrative. She has served on editorial, advisory and government committees, [13] and held visiting professorships at the University of the West Indies (1995, 2004), and New York University (2004). She has been the recipient of a number of research awards and is an adviser to the National Life Story Collection at the British Library [14] and the Raphael Samuel History Centre. [15]
National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1149/27) with Mary Chamberlain in 2012 for its Oral History of Oral History collection held by the British Library. [16]
Her UK debut novel The Dressmaker of Dachau was published in 2015, and has sold to 19 countries. She credits the inspiration for the story to two of her aunts, of whom one left the family and ran away, and the other was imprisoned by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. [17] Other fiction works include 'The Hidden' in 2019, and 'The Forgotten' in 2021, 'The Lie' in 2023 all published by Oneworld. She is also the author of an earlier novel set in the Caribbean, The Mighty Jester.
Chamberlain was one of the London Recruits, a group of young people recruited by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1960s and 1970s to smuggle ANC and SACP literature into South Africa after the ANC had been decimated by the Rivonia trials of 1963/4. [18] [4] [19]
Chamberlain was awarded an honorary Doctorate (D.Litt) by the University of East Anglia in 2021. [20] [21]
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information from people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered voluntarily for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or imposed involuntarily as a judicial punishment. The practice has been compared to the similar institution of slavery, although there are differences.
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Dame Carmen Thérèse Callil, was an Australian publisher, writer and critic who spent most of her career in the United Kingdom. She founded Virago Press in 1973 and received the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. She has been described by Gail Rebuck as "the most extraordinary publisher of her generation".
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Frances-Anne Solomon is an English-Caribbean-Canadian filmmaker, writer, producer, and distributor. She has lived in Britain, Trinidad & Tobago, and Toronto, Canada.
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Barbadian British people, Bajan Brits or British Barbadians, are citizens or residents of the United Kingdom whose ethnic origins lie fully or partially in the Caribbean island of Barbados. The UK is home to the second largest Barbadian-born migrant population out of all the OECD countries, with the 2001 Census recording 21,601 UK residents born on the Caribbean island, compared to the 53,785 Barbadian-born residents of the United States.
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The History of Modern Biomedicine Research Group (HoMBRG) is an academic organisation specialising in recording and publishing the oral history of twentieth and twenty-first century biomedicine. It was established in 1990 as the Wellcome Trust's History of Twentieth Century Medicine Group, and reconstituted in October 2010 as part of the School of History at Queen Mary University of London.
Michael McMillan is a British playwright, artist, curator and educator, born in England to parents who were migrants from St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG). As an academic, he focuses his research on "the creative process, ethnography, oral histories, material culture and performativity". He is the author of several plays, and as an artist his first installation, The West Indian Front Room, was exhibited at the Geffrye Museum in 2005, going on to inspire a 2007 BBC Four documentary Tales from the Front Room, a website, a 2009 book, The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, and various international commissions, such as Van Huis Uit: The Living Room of Migrants in the Netherlands and A Living Room Surrounded by Salt. A more recent installation of the Walter Rodney Bookshop featured as part of the 2015 exhibition No Colour Bar at the Guildhall Art Gallery.
Stella Dadzie is a British educationalist, activist, writer and historian. She is best known for her involvement in the UK's Black Women's Movement, being a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in the 1970s, and co-authoring with Suzanne Scafe and Beverley Bryan in 1985 the book The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain. In 2020, Verso published a new book by Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery & Resistance.
Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) and Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature. She is currently the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president of Cornell University. Among several other awards, she was the recipient of two major awards, both in 2017: the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York State African Studies Association.
Joan Anim-Addo is a Grenadian-born academic, poet, playwright and publisher, who is Emeritus Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture in the English and Creative Writing Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she co-founded with Deirdre Osborne the MA Black British Literature, the world's first postgraduate degree in this field.
Susheila Nasta, MBE, Hon. FRSL, is a British critic, editor, academic and literary activist. She is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literatures at Queen Mary University of London, and founding editor of Wasafiri, the UK's leading magazine for international contemporary writing. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.
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