Dr Helen Barlow
Research Fellow
h.g.barlow@open.ac.uk

Helen Barlow was born in India in 1967, and spent her childhood in south Wales. She went to school in Merthyr Tydfil and then in Cardiff. She read English and American literature and art history at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where she went on to write a Ph. D. thesis in art history, entitled Truth and subjectivity: the photography of Clementina Hawarden and Samuel Butler.

She returned to Cardiff, and in 1993 joined the Open University in Wales as a tutor, for the Arts Faculty. She has taught a number of art history and interdisciplinary courses.

Since 1995, Dr Barlow has worked in academic management at the Open University in Wales, where she is now a Senior Arts Faculty Manager, based at the Cardiff Regional Centre. She has shared responsibility for the quality of teaching and learning in the Arts Faculty in Wales, and is a member of the small team that runs the Arts Faculty’s Level 1 on-line courses. She has a particular interest in the management of quality assurance and quality enhancement systems.

In 1995 Helen started working as a research assistant with Professor Trevor Herbert, and in that capacity has been the project manager for numerous publications including the multi-authored books The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments and The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History, and for a large-scale project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) to produce a definitive single-authored book, The Trombone for Yale University Press. She is also a contributor to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

She is currently the project manager for Trevor Herbert’s research project Cultures of performance among British brass players 1750-1965.

In the course of her work as a Research Fellow, she has developed interests in generic research systems and processes, and has undertaken training in a range of research-related areas, including copy-editing and proofreading (she is an associate member of the Society of Freelance Editors and Proofreaders), copyright law and various research related-software programmes, in particular electronic database and bibliographical systems.