William Farr is the O'Connor Center's senior fellow in regional history and culture, and the Center's founding director. He is a retired professor in UM’s History Department, teaching there for 44 years.  Professor Farr has authored Julius Seyler and the Blackfeet: An Impressionist at Glacier National Park and Montana: Images of the Past, The Reservation Blackfeet: 1882-1945, and  edited Fifty Years After the Big Sky: New Perspectives on the Fiction and Films of A.B. Guthrie, Jr.

Prof. Farr has had articles published in Montana: The Magazine of Western History and The Great Plains Quarterly on various aspects of Blackfeet Indian history. One of these, "Troubled Bundles, Troubled Blackfeet: The Travail of Cultural and Religious Renewal," won the Vivian Paladin Award as the best article in Montana in 1994. In 2000 Farr was reelected by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian to be their academic advisor for the Blackfeet segment of the "Our People" exhibit.