Margaret O'Mara Keynote Speaker

Margaret O’Mara is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington.

Margaret 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 (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, with David Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, of the widely used United States history college textbook, The American Pageant (Cengage).

Margaret’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs and other outlets. She is an active public speaker, appears regularly in national and international broadcast media, and has contributed her expertise to development of Mattel’s American Girl dolls.

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 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.

She received her MA/PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Northwestern University. Prior to her academic career, she served in the Clinton Administration, working on economic and social policy in the White House and in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.