Dr. Andrew Meade McGee is an historian of science and technology who serves as curator of computing. He oversees the Museum’s collection of computers, aerospace electronics, and devices related to guidance, navigation, and control in spaceflight.
A scholar of the politics, technology, culture, and business of the twentieth- and twenty-first century United States, McGee specializes in the policy, economic, social, and environmental frameworks that shaped modern information technologies and global digital society. He is interested in governments, institutions, technologies, and markets and how the intersections of those varied forces in the task of managing information can structure public policy, shape culture, and remake the natural and man-made worlds. He researches histories of hardware, software, automation, algorithms, artificial intelligence, bureaucratic structures of IT, digital media, internet cultures, and all manner of ways in which computing remakes American society.
Prior to coming to the Smithsonian, McGee held the Kluge Fellowship in Digital Studies at the Library of Congress and taught as visiting faculty at Washington and Lee University and Carnegie Mellon University, where he also served as CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Science and Computing. He holds an AB in History and Literature from Harvard College and an MA and PhD in History from the University of Virginia.
McGee’s current book project, Mainframing America: The Political Computer and the Creation of Modern U.S. Information State and Society, 1945-1985, is a political history of the computer in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s, examining the institutional, intellectual, and governmental policy origins of modern American information society
In 2022, McGee collaborated with the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation on the symposium, “Robotics and Artificial Intelligence: New Perspectives.”