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Biography
Margaret O’Mara is a historian of the modern United States. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of American politics, and the connections between the two.
Margaret is the author of two acclaimed books on the history of the modern technology industry: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Penguin Press, 2019) and Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search For The Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, 2005). She also is a historian of the American presidency and author of Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century (Penn Press, 2015). She is a coauthor of the widely used United States history textbook, The American Pageant (Cengage) and is an editor of the Politics and Society in Modern America series at Princeton University Press. Her byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, The American Prospect, and other national and international publications.
At UW, she teaches courses in the history of the technology industry, the history of capitalism, modern politics, and urban and metropolitan history. She was the inaugural recipient of the UW Distinguished Teaching Award for Innovation with Technology, and she is a faculty advisor for the UW Science, Technology, and Society Studies Graduate Certificate Program and on the curriculum committee for the UW Data Science Minor.
Margaret is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer and a past fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. She received her MA/PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, her BA from Northwestern University, and is an alumna of Little Rock Central High School. From 1993 to 1997, she served in the Clinton Administration as an economic and social policy aide in the White House and in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
When not in Smith Hall, you can find Margaret on the sidelines of her teenagers’ soccer games and dance competitions, reading a book in her backyard hammock (Seattle weather permitting), and hiking with the best dog in the world.
(Last name pronounced “O-mare-a.”)