For the Record: [Un]Official Voices at the V&A

This overview of the historical and affective value of oral history recordings draws on my current research on curators at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Questions about the changing definition of the title ‘curator’ over time but also about the way the oral history interview as a medium demonstrates this are raised. In telling of their lives, curators’ agency is extended to encompass the construction of their narrative identity. The entanglement of the ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’ persona of the curator is revealed. Nevertheless, is it possible to disentangle this distinction? Is it even necessary? Or, is the personal voice the medium for reflecting and transmitting the multi-layered snapshots of experience, and that what engages is this very quality of the life lived as a story?

This article includes sound files which can be accessed at http://www.jcms-journal.com/article/view/jcms.1011208/49.