Mary Marshall Clark

In addition to being the Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research located in INCITE, Mary Marshall Clark is Founding Co-Director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) degree program, created in 2008-09. Formerly, she was an oral historian and filmmaker at the New York Times. Mary Marshall has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991, and was president of the United States Oral History Association from 2001-2002, and has served on the Executive Council of the International Oral History Association.

She was the co-principal investigator, with Peter Bearman, of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, a longitudinal oral history project through which over 1,000 hours of interviews were taken with eye-witnesses and immigrants and others who suffered in the aftermath of the events. She also directed related projects on the aftermath of September 11th in New York City.

She has directed projects on the Carnegie Corporation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Japanese Internment on the East Coast, the Apollo Theater and Women in the Visual Arts. She has interviewed lead figures in the media, human rights, women’s movements and the arts.

Mary Marshall writes on issues of memory, the mass media, trauma, and ethics in oral history. Her current work focuses on the global impact of torture and detention policies at Guantánamo Bay. Mary Marshall is an editor of After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 11, 2001 and the Years that Followed, published by The New Press in September, 2011. She is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Clark holds two masters degrees from Union Theological Seminary.