Historian. Author. Creator.

Tom Mullaney is a historian, teacher, curator, archivist, and songwriter. Author of How We Disappear, Mullaney is Professor of History and UNESCO Chair in Digital Futures at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and former Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress. He is Director of Stanford’s Science, Technology, and Society Program, and also directs SILICON, a Stanford Presidential Initiative advancing endangered, at-risk, and digitally disadvantaged languages worldwide. How We Disappear is his eighth book, and first with a major trade press.

Books by Tom Mullaney include The Chinese Typewriter, which earned one of History’s highest honors, the John King Fairbank Prize, and Where Research Begins (with Chris Rea), now a cornerstone of research education worldwide, having sold nearly a quarter-million copies and been translated into seven languages.

The recipient of Stanford’s highest award for teaching, the Gores Award, Mullaney also served as President of one of the largest parent–teacher cooperatives in the world, CCSC, and in addition to his 20+ years as a university educator, he has logged over 1,000 hours of classroom experience in infant–PreK education.

A first-generation college student, he produces the popular YouTube channel First Gen Professor, a trusted resource for navigating academic life, and he has organized more than one hundred conferences and workshops featuring thousands of early-career scholars—especially those historically excluded from the academic spotlight—making him one of the most impactful event programmers in academia today.

As a curator, Mullaney has organized several major exhibitions, including Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age and Facing the World: Global Typography and Type Design; Radical Machines, shown at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York, inspired SFO Airport Museum’s major exhibition The Typewriter: An Innovation in Writing, which featured Mullaney’s collection of Chinese and Japanese machines. Mullaney built and donated the world’s largest collection on East Asian information technology history, and negotiated Stanford’s acquisition of the legendary MingKwai Chinese typewriter—featured on NPR, Popular Science, and a New York Times cover story.

As a public intellectual, his work has been featured in The Atlantic, the BBC, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, MIT Technology Review, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, NPR, South China Morning Post, IEEE Spectrum, and The Economist, among many other venues, as well as in invited lectures at OpenAI, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Adobe.

Beyond academia, Mullaney is a recording and touring musician; working with producers such as Paul Mahajan (TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The National), his groups The Black Spoons and Chairman Wow toured internationally, including SXSW and CMJ, and he also founded Indie Night School, which directed music education programming for ASCAP, Noise Pop, and the Plug Awards in the early 2000s.