Accomplished folklorist Dr. Margaret A. Mills served on Ohio State’s faculty from 1998 to 2012. During that time, she was an associate of the Center for Folklore Studies and the Mershon Center for Strategic Studies and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.
Mills’ scholarship engages folk and popular cultures of Persian-language regions of the world, with a special focus on Afghanistan. Her many books and articles explore themes of gender politics, rhetoric, myth, and narrative technique in oral storytelling traditions. Much of Mills’ work developed through long-term relationships with master female storytellers in Afghanistan, including Madar Zaher.
The Margaret Mills Collection at the CFS Archive provides an informal and often personal record of Mills’ scholarly career – from the 1970s, when she studied with Dr. Albert Lord at Harvard, until her retirement in 2012. Materials in the collection include published and unpublished articles, a final version of Mills’ 1978 doctoral dissertation, notes, correspondences, and scholarly ephemera gathered from a life of teaching and research. The collection also holds an extensive audio (tape) record of academic lectures from Mills’ years as a student and young academic.
Two 12 x 12 x 18 inch cardboard boxes comprise the collection. One contains 36 folders of printed and handwritten materials, from the aforementioned categories. In the other are 115 cassette tapes of audio recordings, stored in 15 plastic cases.
Written materials and audio tapes can be accessed on-site at the CFS archive, located at 455 Hagerty Hall on OSU’s main campus. Please contact the archive at cfs@osu.edu to schedule an appointment.
Public-facing Module: Document on the PM Collection
In Autumn 2023, a comprehensive document was created to commemorate the Margaret Mills collection at The Ohio State University’s College of Arts and Sciences Center for Folklore Studies Archive. It was produced by graduate students in the Department of Comparative Studies doctoral program as part of a learning lab in archival methods.