Megan Friedel
- Associate Professor
- Head of Distinctive Collections & Institutional Memory
- RESEARCH & INNOVATION STRATEGIES
- COLLECTION AND ARCHIVAL STRATEGY
Office Hours
Contact the University Libraries’ Rare and Distinctive Collections to set up a research consultation and learn more about accessing our collections, or to inquire about donating materials to our collections: rad@colorado.edu
Megan K. Friedel is Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries, where she serves as Head of Distinctive Collections & Institutional Memory and Senior Collections Archivist for the CU Boulder Libraries' Archives. In these roles, Friedel manages planning, acquisitions, deaccessioning, and community engagement for the Archives and its unique collections. She has worked professionally as an archivist for over twenty years, both at state historical societies in Massachusetts, Oregon, and Colorado and as an academic archivist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, before joining the CU Boulder Libraries faculty in 2018. She holds BA in English from Amherst College and both an MLS and a MA in History from Simmons College.
Friedel is also an award-winning scholar whose work explores the intersection of archival practice and social justice. Her current research focuses on disability and eugenics histories within archival collections. Friedel is the co-author of the book, Providing Access to Privacy-Protected Records in the Age of Radical Empathy: Cases and Considerations (Society of American Archivists, 2026) and, as both an archivist and visual historian, has also written about Indigenous histories within photographs of the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest and partnerships between archives and artists to create public art. Her work has been published in The American Archivist, Journal of Western Archives, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, and Oregon Historical Quarterly. Friedel is the 2026 winner of the Society of American Archivists Fellows' Ernst Posner Award for her work on Down Syndrome histories in archives. She also received the 2025 Best Article Award from the Journal of Western Archives, with co-author Jasmine Baetz, for their article documenting the Los Seis de Boulder Sculpture Project, as well as the 2009 Joel Palmer Award (Honorable Mention) from the Oregon Historical Quarterly, with co-author Terry Toedtemeier, for their scholarship on American landscape photographer Carleton Watkins' stereoscopic photographs of the Columbia River Gorge.
Additionally, Megan K. Friedel currently serves as an appointed member of the Society of American Archivist's Archival Repatriation Committee (term: 2024-2027). Alongside the committee's members, she co-authored the "Principles in Indigenous Archival Repatriation," adopted in 2025 by the Society of American Archivists as a national professional standard for archivists who hold Indigenous knowledge within their collections.