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Toby Butler

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Reader, Geography, Royal Holloway University of London

Dr Toby Butler is a heritage consultant and public historian with a particular interest in oral history, digital heritage, and mapping memories. For six years Toby led an innovative MA programme in Heritage Studies: place, memory and history at the Raphael Samuel History Centre. Toby is known internationally for his work exploring how history and memory can be mapped and used to interpret places and their pasts. Projects include Ports of Call, working with community groups and artists around the docks of East London to map and historically interpret the area; the Bethnal Green Disaster Memorial Project and Groundbreakers, mapping and interpreting the pre-Olympic history of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford. Toby is currently a reader in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is leading a major AHRC funded research project on the oral history of the environmental movement. He is also a digital education consultant at Birkbeck, University of London where he recently worked on the Mapping Museums project, to create an online database and map of all the museums in the UK from 1960-present featuring his interviews with 57 museum founders and he co-ordinated a project to set up a regional support network for aviation museums.

Experience

  • 2022–present
    Reader, Royal Holloway, University of London

Education

  • 2007 
    Royal Holloway, PhD

Publications

  • 2022
    Stories from Small Museums, Manchester University Press
  • 2020
    Learning by doing: memoryscape as an educational tool Butler, T., 2020, The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place. De Nardi, S. (ed.), Routledge
  • 2015
    The 1943 Bethnal Green Tube Shelter Disaster: An Oral History, University of East London
  • 2015
    History 2.0: History, Publics and New Technologies Butler, T., 2015, The Impact of History? Histories at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Pinto, P. & Taithe, T. (eds.)., Routledge
  • 2015
    The historical hearing aid: located oral history from the listener’s perspective Butler, T., 2015, The Oral History Reader. Perks, R. & Thompson, A. (eds.). Third ed. , Routledge
  • 2009
    Memoryscape: integrating oral history, memory and landscape on the river Thames Butler, T., 2009, People and their Pasts: Public History Today. Ashton, P. & Kean, H. (eds.). , Palgrave McMillan