Directors of the Oral History Project
Martha Skeeters, Director
Martha Skeeters is Associate Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of Community and Clergy (Oxford University Press/Clarendon.) Currently she is writing a book about the intersections of gender, religion and economics in witchcraft accusations in early modern England.
Because oral history can give voice to those who may not be included in written sources, Dr. Skeeters celebrates it as a tool of social justice. Born and raised in East Texas, her awareness of the need for social justice comes from childhood observations of racial segregation, experiences of gender and class discrimination, and writing her master’s thesis on Martin Luther’s view of women. She has testified before government entities on gender in textbooks and poor women’s reproductive rights and is co-founder and president of the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice.
Julie Stidolph, Co-Director
Julie Stidolph is a Ph.D. candidate in Native American history at the University of Oklahoma. She earned her M.A. at the University of Wyoming where she wrote her thesis on Shoshone and Arapaho women on the Wind River Reservation around the turn of the twentieth century. She came to the University of Oklahoma as a Hudson Fellow and is currently writing her dissertation on federal Indian health care, Indian health, and gender.
As a scholar of Native American history, she came to Oklahoma with an appreciation for the value of oral history in preserving voices typically left out of written records and other sources generated by institutions of the dominant culture. Her experience with the “Red Dirt Women and Power” project further reinforced her commitment to the exciting and rewarding methodology of oral history.
