Margaret MacMillan is a historian specializing in the international history of the 19th and 20th centuries. She is currently professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto and professor emeritus of international history at the University of Oxford. She was provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto between 2002 and 2007 and the warden of St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford from 2007 to 2017.
Her publications include Women of the Raj (1988); Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2001), for which she won the Samuel Johnson Prize (U.K.) and the Governor General’s Award for English Language Non-Fiction (Canada); Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World (2006); The Uses and Abuses of History (2008); and The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (2014). Her most recent book is War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020). In 2021 MacMillan won the Pritzker Military Museum & Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.
MacMillan received a BA in honors history from the University of Toronto and a BPhil in politics and DPhil from the University of Oxford. She taught at Ryerson University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford. Visiting appointments include the Humanitas Professor of War, Cambridge University, the Xerox Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. In 2015 she gave the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Massey Lectures and in 2018 the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Reith Lectures.
MacMillan has served on numerous boards, including the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (1995–2006), the Central European University (2018–2021), and the Rhodes Trust (2010–2018). Currently she is on the boards of the Imperial War Museum and the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Society of Canada, and an honorary fellow of the British Academy and of the Learned Society of Wales. She has honorary degrees from a number of universities and is a Companion of the Order of Canada, a Companion of Honour (U.K.), and was recently made a member of the Order of Merit (U.K.).
