Directors

Mary Murphy is Distinguished Professor of Letters and Science at Montana State University Bozeman, where she teaches courses in the history of the North American West,  gender, and the history of food.  Among her books are Hope in Hard Times: New Deal Photographs of Montana, 1936-1942 and Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41.  She is currently working on two book projects, “Culinary Diplomacy: Gender, Food, and Politics on the Northern Borderlands,” and with co-authors, Molly Kruckenberg, Zoe Ann Stoltz, and Jan Zauha, “Cooking Up the Past: A Culinary History of Montana.”

She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Bienecke Library, the Cody Institute for Western American Studies, the Montana Historical Society, and the Ucross Foundation.  In 2013 she received the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award.