Arthur McIvor is Professor of Social History at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland and Director of the Scottish Oral History Centre, which he co-founded in 1995. He was raised in Coventry, England, and his father worked on the assembly line at the Standard Triumph car plant in Coventry most of his life. His research interests lie in labour history, the oral history of work and the body and he has published widely in these areas, including Organised Capital (1996), Lethal Work (with Ronald Johnston: 2000), Miners’ Lung (with Ronald Johnston: 2007), Working Lives (2013) and Men in Reserve (with Juliette Pattinson and Linsey Robb, 2017). McIvor’s recent work on the social and health impacts of deindustrialization in Scotland/UK includes a chapter in High, MacKinnon and Perchard (eds), The Deindustrialized World (2017); ‘Scrap Heap Stories: Oral Narratives of Labour and Loss in Scottish Mining and Manufacturing’ in Stefan Moitra and Katarzyna Nogueira (eds), (Post) Industrial Memories: Oral History and Structural Change, BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen, 31: 2 (2018); and ‘Blighted lives: Deindustrialisation, health and well-being in the Clydeside region’, in Marion Fontaine and Xavier Vigna (eds), Désindustrialisation, 20 & 21: Revue d’histoire, vol. 144 (2019).
Email: a.mcivor@strath.ac.uk
Scottish Oral History Centre: https://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/schoolofhumanities/history/scottishoralhistorycentre/
Current project
McIvor continues to work on deindustrialization, health and the body and he serves as co-organiser of the gender research strand of the DePOT project with Jackie Clarke. He also acts as Principal Investigator on a two year (2020-22) oral history research project: ‘The Lost Villages: Deindustrialization in East Ayrshire Mining Communities’, funded by National Heritage Lottery Fund, Historic Environment Scotland and East Ayrshire Council. The aim is to facilitate storytelling and capture the memories of the last generation who lived in the ‘miners’ rows’ and worked in Ayrshire coal mines, and document their narratives of the lived experience of mine closure and village depopulation in the second half of the twentieth century.
