Meet our director

Mary Larson is the Puterbaugh Professor of Library Service and Associate Dean for Distinctive Collections, having originally come to OSU as the head of the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program after working in oral history at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Nevada. She has served as a two-term president of the Oral History Association (OHA), as chair of the Ethics and Professional Conduct Committee and the Oral History Section for the Society of American Archivists, as a board member of the Southwest Oral History Association (SOHA), and as chair of numerous other professional committees. For a number of years she was also the media review editor for The Oral History Review and an editor for the H-Oralhist listserv. Her areas of interest include the intersections of anthropology and history, issues of shared authority, ethics and technology, digital humanities, and rural women's history. Her recent publications include a chapter in the book Beyond Women's Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge 2018), "'The Medium is the Message': Oral History, Media, and Mediation" (Oral History Review 2016), and the book Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement (Palgrave 2014, co-edited with Doug Boyd).