Megan Friedel

Megan K. Friedel is Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries, where she serves as Head of Distinctive Collections & Institutional Memory and the Lead Archivist for the CU Boulder Archives. In these roles, Megan 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.

Megan’s scholarship explores the intersection of archival practice and social justice. Her current research focuses on disability and eugenics histories within archival collections. She 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 a visual historian, has also written about Indigenous histories within photographs of the nineteenth-century Pcific 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. Megan currently serves as an appointed member of the Society of American Archivist's Archival Repatriation Committee, with whom she is a co-author of "Principles in Indigenous Archival Repatriation," adopted in 2025 by the Society of American Archivists as a national standard for archivists who hold Indigenous knowledge within their collections.

Megan Friedel holds a BA in English from Amherst College and both an MLS and a MA in History from Simmons College.