Mary Marshall Clark

Contact

mmc17@columbia.edu | CV

About

Mary Marshall Clark is the Director of the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research, founded in 1948. She is co-founding director of Columbia’s Master of Arts degree in Oral History. Mary Marshall has been involved with the oral history movement since 1991 and was president of the United States Oral History Association in 2001-2002. She was the co-principal investigator of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, a longitudinal oral history project totaling over 1,000 hours of eye-witness testimony taken in New York city’s diverse populations. She worked with colleagues to supervise and develop the Telling Lives Curriculum Project, in which diverse youth in Chinatown were taught oral history skills to interpret the consequences of 9/11 in their communities and families.

Mary Marshall is a co-principal investigator and interviewer on The Obama Presidency Oral History Project, focusing on the leadership of Michelle Obama. She is co-principal investigator on "I See My Light Shining,” founded by Jacqueline Woodson and modeled on the Federal Writers Project. In 2009, Mary Marshall founded and directed a comprehensive oral history project, “Guantanamo and the Rule of Law,” in which over 350 hours were collected on legal, moral, and ethical issues surrounding the use of the prison as a site of detention and torture. Mary Marshall has completed longitudinal oral history projects on the Carnegie Corporation and the Atlantic Philanthropies. She has directed projects on the Council of Foreign Relations, the Harriman Institute and Columbia's history of feminist thought and inquiry. Most recently she co-directed an extensive project on the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ rights.

Mary Marshall was lead editor of After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 11, 2001 and the Years that Followed (The New Press, 2011); and a co-editor of Robert Rauschenberg: An Oral History (Columbia University Press, 2019), and co-authored the human rights publication Documenting and Interpreting Conflict: A Working Guide. She is editor of the Columbia University Oral History Press Series.

Mary Marshall is the 2012 recipient of the Distinguished Alumna Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for contributions to public history, and the 2017 Forrest C. Pogue Award for contributions to oral history. She is a Distinguished Lecturer with the Organization of American Historians, and lectures and gives public workshops.