Oral History Section 2015 Candidate Bios

Nominations for Vice Chair/Chair-Elect (1 open position):

Mary Larson 

 

Nominations for Steering Committee (2 open positions):

Talya Cooper

Ellen Brooks

 

Candidate details:

Ellen Brooks

ellen brooks headshot Ellen Brooks currently works as the Oral Historian at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum (WVM) in Madison.  After graduating from Fordham University in 2008 with a B.A in History and a B.A. in Communications, she worked on various projects, including interning with the Chicago History Museum and the Chicago Cultural Alliance. In 2013 she graduated from the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University. Prior to joining the WVM staff, Brooks worked at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she aided in organizing the Museum’s oral history collection and advised on integrating oral history into public programming.

Brooks has held the position of Oral Historian at WVM since late 2013. She is responsible for managing the oral history program by actively gathering oral histories from veterans across Wisconsin, and, on the archival side, overseeing the preservation, and maintenance of the oral history collection. She is also active in the Oral History Association and the Midwest Archives Conference. 

 

Talya Cooper

Talya Cooper headshot with cute lapdog

I have been working for the StoryCorps archive for since 2007. Initially, I served as both a sound technician and an archivist, and now, as Archive Manager, I oversee and maintain the collection. The past eight years have seen tremendous changes in both the oral history community and the world of digital archives. StoryCorps, like other institutions, has made significant policy decisions about privacy and confidentiality, ethics and access. We have also faced technical challenges related to recording and archiving our born-digital interviews. Our current project--expanding public online access to the archive--brings another set of questions and opportunities for us. As we've participated in conversations about these huge issues within the oral history archiving community, it has been a pleasure and privilege for me to connect with my peers at other institutions. It would be a tremendous opportunity to be able to strengthen those connections and to advocate for other oral historians and archivists' best interests as a member of the steering committee for the Oral History Section of SAA. Though I am fairly new to SAA, I have been involved in my local archives community and have presented to the New York Archivists' Roundtable and ARLIS-NY, and at the Oral History Association annual conference. I hold an MLIS from Pratt Institute and attended Columbia University's Oral History Summer Institute in 2011. I'm a firm believer in oral history's potential to support social justice work and to bring about social change.

 

Mary Larson 

Mary Larson headshot I attended my first SAA meeting in Orlando in 1998, and one of the things I noticed almost immediately was the tension between the sometimes competing interests of collecting and preserving cultural heritage materials. Since I have been involved in oral history both in the field, as a researcher and interviewer, and from an administrative and archival perspective, as well, I understand both sides of the equation. My work in recent years has focused on the intersection between creating an interview, archiving it, and curating it (particularly in the digital era), and I am especially interested in generating conversations about how people can ethically disseminate, contextualize, and make meaning from publicly available oral histories. I think that this section is the perfect place for that sort of dialogue.

Mary Larson is currently the Associate Dean for Special Collections at Oklahoma State University (OSU) and has been working with oral history and archival collections for over twenty-five years. She has directed the oral history programs at OSU and the University of Nevada, Reno, and she also worked for a number of years with Project Jukebox at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks Oral History Program. She served as president of the Oral History Association (US) from 2011-2013 and was a member of the OHA Council before that. She has also been a chair and member of a number of committees and task forces for that organization, was an active editor for the separate H-Oralhist listserv for fourteen years, and was the media review editor for the Oral History Review for five.