Latest news

A new Trustee for the Mass Observation Archive

The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive have welcomed Jeremy Crow to the Trustee board. Jeremy is Head of Literary Estates at the Society of Authors, which acts as the literary representative of the estates of a number of distinguished writers. Jeremy joined the Trustees at their last meeting in January.   

Dear Diary....

Towards the end of 2009 the Mass Observation Archive helped the BBC with a programme about diary writing. As part of the production, Victoria Wood and Rory Bremner visited the Archive and were filmed looking at some wartime Mass Observation diaries. The programme is the third part in a series called "Dear Diary" and will be broadcast on BBC 4 on Monday 18th January. After the broadcast, it will be available on the BBC's iplayer service for one week. More details about the programme can be found here.

Women, War and Remembrance

Dorothy Sheridan (Director of the Mass Observation Project) will be delivering a paper at the Women, War and Remembrance conference at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire on 13th March. More information about the conference can be downloaded here.

Family Britain, 1951-1957 by David Kynaston

Following on from the acclaimed Austerity Britain, David Kynaston’s latest publication uses personal writing (including material from the Mass Observation Archive) to create a vivid, but unsentimental, picture of what every day life was like for British society as it moved away from the painful hardships of the post war period and into the 1950s. Family Britain is published by Bloomsbury and avalible to buy here.

Recording Leisure Lives: holidays and tourism in 20th century Britain

Drawing its inspiration from Humphrey Spender's Mass Observation photographs of Blackpool, this conference focuses on the leisure experiences of people on holiday in twentieth century Britain.

The conference organisers welcome proposals (max. 300 words) for papers of  twenty minutes that address any aspect of holidays and tourism under one or more of the conference sub-themes:

-Home and away: constructing the 'tourist gaze'
-Cities, the seaside and the spaces of tourism
-Weekends, wakes and bank holidays: domestic tourism in C20th Britain
-Holidaying in the past: heritage as tourism
-Researching holidays as leisure experiences
-Snapshots, records and archives: representations of holidays and tourism

For more information about the conference visit the University of Bolton's webpage

Please submit proposals to Dr Robert Snape by Friday 15th January 2010.

The 7th Biennial International Auto/biography Association Conference at the University of Sussex, 29 June-2 July 2010

The International Auto/biography Association (IABA) was created at Peking University in 1999. Since then, it has held six major international conferences in Asia, North America, Australia and Europe. The next conference will be the first in the UK. The Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex is inviting scholars, life writers and life historians to join in a global dialogue on life writing.For move information and details of how to submit a paper to the conference please contact the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research