Education
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2002.
Biography
Margaret O'Mara is a historian of 20th century America, specializing in political and urban history. Her research focuses on postwar political institutions, the rise of the global 'knowledge economy,' and the evolution of post-industrial urban economic geographies. She is the author of
Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, 2005), which considered the relationship between metropolitan development, higher education, and the Cold War state in determining the geography of the high-tech economy. Her current research pursues these themes on a transnational scale, considering the role of political institutions in economic globalization and urban change in the US and around the world since 1940.
Professor O'Mara teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on political history, urban history, environmental history, and Western history as well as core survey courses and seminars in U.S. history.
Selected Bibliography
“The Geography of Knowledge Work,” Places: A Forum for Design in the Public Realm, Spring 2007.
“Cold War Politics and Scientific Communities: The Case of Silicon Valley,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, May 2006.
“Uncovering the City in the Suburb,” in The New Suburban History, edited by Kevin Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, May 2006.
“Suburbia Reconsidered: Race, Politics, and Property in the Twentieth-Century Metropolis,” Journal of Social History, September 2005.
Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.
