Dr Mia Martin Hobbs and Dr Geraldine Fela have been appointed joint editors of the Oral History Australia journal Studies in Oral History, starting with the 2026 issue.
Mia and Geraldine replace Dr Carolyn Collins and Dr Skye Krichauff whose most recent issue was published on 24 November. Carolyn was joint editor of Studies in Oral History for the 2024 and 2025 issues and Skye was joint editor from 2019 through to 2025.
Announcing the new appointments, the OHA national committee thanked Carolyn and Skye for their outstanding work.
Dr Mia Martin Hobbs is an oral historian of war and its legacies. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2018. Based on her dissertation, her first book, Return to Vietnam: An Oral History of American and Australian Veterans’ Journeys (Cambridge University Press, 2021) won the Oral History Australia Book Award in 2022. She has published on war memory and veterans’ experiences in Journal of American Studies, Australian Journal of Politics & History and The Oral History Review, as well as in edited collections including the forthcoming Challenging Anzac: Stories that don’t fit the legend (NewSouth, 2026) which she co-edited with Carolyn Holbrook and Joan Beaumont. She is an ARC DECRA fellow, undertaking a transnational oral history with women and minority veterans from the War on Terror at Deakin University.
Dr Geraldine Fela is an award-winning historian and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at Macquarie University. Her research traverses histories of gender and sexuality, labour, social movements and medicine. She was recently awarded the 2025 Prime Ministers Literary Award for her book ‘Critical Care: Nurses on the Frontline of Australia’s AIDS Crisis’ (UNSW Press, 2024). She has also worked as a Features Producer for the ABC, where her historical research into the 1998 Waterfront Dispute underpinned the 2025 Rewind series Conspiracy? War on the Waterfront.
Next issue
The Call for Papers for the 2026 issue of Studies in Oral History, Issue 48, is expected to be released soon on this website.
In other news
The OHA constitution was recently updated to allow for an expanded national committee with two delegates from each state.
The updated constitution and national committee, together with the 2025 President’s report is available on our Governance page.
