Mary Larson

editor of We Were All Athletes: Women's Athletics and Title IX at the University of Nevada

November 4, 2015

Mary Larson is the Doris Neustadt Professor of Library Service and the Head of the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at OSU, and she has been conducting oral histories for more than twenty years, having previously worked with programs at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Nevada. She holds an MA and PhD in anthropology from Brown University, where her specialty was ethnohistory, and she has served in various capacities with the national Oral History Association, most recently being elected as First Vice-President of the organization. At OSU, she is part of the leadership team for the Center for Oklahoma Studies, along with Ron McCoy (History) and Dennis Preston (English). Her recent oral history interviews include a series on the 1957 anthrax outbreak in Oklahoma, and she has been developing projects on Willham House (the university president's residence) and on women's athletics at OSU. Along with other members of the OSU Library, she has also been collaborating with the Cherokee Nation on upcoming efforts. Beyond topical studies, her research has centered on evolving technology and ethical concerns in oral history and the utilization of new media formats for accessibility.

In 2007, Mary Larson and Allison Tracy began interviewing former women athletes, coaches, and administrators at the University of Nevada in an effort to document the evolution of women's athletics there, both before and after Title IX legislation. The project was suggested by the university booster group Pack PAWS (Promoting and Advancing Women in Sports), who felt that students in 2007 had very little sense of how different things had been in the past. Pack PAWS members shared their recollections of sleeping on gym floors instead of in hotels and of feeding a basketball team a bag of apples for dinner on the road because the women's teams had virtually no travel money. At the same time, male athletes at Nevada were being flown to games and were staying in hotels and eating in upscale restaurants. Pack PAWS wanted to collect the stories of those who had participated in the early years of women's intercollegiate athletics, and they worked with the University of Nevada Oral History Program to initiate the project. In a little over a year, Larson and Tracy conducted more than 150 hours of interviews, which they then edited (with later assistance from Alicia Barber) into We Were All Athletes.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2011-honorees/mary-larson

Last Updated: 14 January 2022