About

On the personal side:  My name is Mike O’Malley.  I live in Arlington VA with my wife Kathleen and our daughter Frances, age 7. I’m a semi-professional musician and play bass and guitar, gigging around the DC area in various different bands ranging from bar band blues to jazz.

Gypsy Jazz gig with the Bitter Dose Combo

On the academic side: I teach American history at George Mason University in Fairfax VA. I got a BA from Temple University, Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, where I worked with Lawrence Levine and Michael Rogin. Publications include Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, and in 2012, Face: Value: The Entwined History of Race and Money in America. With James Cook and Lawrence Glickman, I co-edited The Cultural Turn in US History: Past, Present, Future, also published by the University of Chicago.

It’s probably fair to say I was a pioneer in digital media and history. When I first came to GMU in 1994, Roy Rosenzweig had just gotten the grant to start CHNM. I set up our first webserver and website, and set out to experiment with digital technology in the classroom. This was one of my most ambitious experiments: “Magic, Illusion and Detection.” I think it’s  fair to say the the “notebook” feature that Elena Razlogova and I came up with was the starting point for Zotero.