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.