Margaret O’Mara is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American History at the University of Washington. She is a leading historian of Silicon Valley and the author of two acclaimed books about the modern American technology industry: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019) and Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search For The Next Silicon Valley (2005). She is also a historian of the American presidency and author of Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century (2015) and a coauthor, with David Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, of the United States history college textbook The American Pageant.
O'Mara's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, and Foreign Affairs. She is an active public speaker, comments regularly in national and international broadcast media, and has been a historical consultant for Mattel's American Girl. She 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 is a series editor of the Politics and Society in Modern America series at Princeton University Press and serves on the editorial board of Modern American History. Prior to her academic career, she served in the Clinton Administration, working on economic and social policy in the White House and in the US Department of Health and Human Services.
O'Mara received her MA/PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Northwestern University. She lives outside Seattle with her husband Jeff, two teenage daughters, and world's best dog.
