British Academy Fellow commemorates 50th anniversary of the Aberfan Disaster

Professor Iain McLean FBA, Professor of Politics at Nuffield College Oxford, has been heavily involved in marking the 50^th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, in which the collapse of a colliery tip killed 116 children and 28 adults in the village of Aberfan in South Wales on 21 October 1966.

Professor McLean took part in the BBC documentary Aberfan: The Fight for Justice and has also appeared on BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC News Channel.

As an undergraduate in 1966, Professor McLean organised a collection among students for the Aberfan Disaster Fund. In 1996, with the Aberfan records to be released under the ’30-year rule’ by the UK National Archives, he received a British Academy Small Research Grant to catalogue and preserve documents relating to the disaster. This led to a book with Martin Johnes, Aberfan: government and disasters, and a website on their findings.

Download Professor McLean’s piece for the British Academy Review, 'Lessons from the Aberfan disaster and its aftermath' here.

You can read more about Professor McLean’s involvement with Aberfan here: http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/ke-impact/learning-from-disaster.html.