Bio
Margaret Eastman Smith currently serves as the Director of the Program on Trauma Healing and Community Resilience for the Institute of World Affairs, a Washington, DC-based NGO.
Between 1999 and 2017 she was on the faculty of the Program on International Peace and Conflict Resolution at American University in Washington, DC. She taught courses aimed at helping students confront differences and assist in building a more resilient society, especially in places of deep social division. She has written about and participated in a number of programs addressing the role of history and memory in reinforcing social norms and rigidifying the boundaries of divided societies. Her areas of specialization include nationalist and ethnic conflict, uses of memory in politics, and post-conflict reconstruction in deeply divided societies.
Earlier, with the international program of Initiatives of Change, Margaret spent four years in Papua New Guinea helping women make adjustments in their lives necessitated by changes connected with that country’s independence from Australia. She spent a further four years in Richmond, Virginia working on projects to improve community relations.
Her doctoral research focused on ways dissemination of historical ideas can be used to mitigate conflict, including the pedagogy of the teaching of history as a tool for post-conflict reconstruction. The research issued in Reckoning with the Past: Teaching History in Northern Ireland (Lexington Books, 2005). Her Ph.D. is from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.
Margaret earned an MA in History from Boston University, and a second MA, in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, from Lesley University.