Michael J. Halvorson
Benson Family Chair in Business and Economic History
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Phone: 253-535-8258
Email: halvormj@plu.edu
Office Location: Xavier Hall - 116
Curriculum Vitae: View my CV
Employed: 23 Years
- Professional
- Biography
Additional Titles/Roles
- Professor of History
Education
- Ph.D., History, University of Washington, 2001
- M.A., History, University of Washington, 1996
- B.A., Computer Science, Pacific Lutheran University, 1985
Areas of Emphasis or Expertise
- Oral History
- Institutional Memory
- Public Speaking
- Historical Research
- Media Studies
- Early Modern Europe / Reformation Germany / Lutheranism
Books
- This Little World: A How-To Guide for Social Innovators (Routledge 2024) : View Book
- Code Nation: Personal Computing and the Learn to Program Movement in America (ACM Books 2020) : View Book
- The Renaissance: All That Matters (McGraw-Hill 2015) : View Book
- Microsoft Visual Basic 2013 Step by Step (Microsoft Press 2013) : View Book
- Heinrich Heshusius and Confessional Polemic in Early Lutheran Orthodoxy (Ashgate 2010) : View Book
- Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate 2008) : View Book
Biography
Michael Halvorson is Professor of History at Pacific Lutheran University, where he teaches courses on technology, innovation, media culture, European history, and the cultural impact of historical change. His work explores how human beings learn, preserve, and interpret technological and social systems across time through books, archives, oral history, games, and public knowledge institutions.
His most recent books are This Little World: A How-to Guide for Social Innovators (2024), co-authored with Shelly Cano Kurtz, and Code Nation: Personal Computing and the Learn to Program Movement in America (2020). Together, these projects examine the human dimensions of technological culture, digital transformation, education, and social change in modern society.
Before entering academic life full-time, Halvorson worked at Microsoft during the formative years of personal computing and later authored or edited more than thirty books related to programming, software, and computing culture. His historical scholarship also includes research on religion, institutions, and early modern Europe, particularly the social and intellectual history of the Reformation era.
Halvorson is also interested in oral history and the preservation of institutional memory, particularly within technology organizations and computing culture. In 2023 and 2024, he worked with Microsoft Alumni Voices as Senior Oral Historian to help record the memories and experiences of former Microsoft employees as the company approached its fiftieth anniversary (1975–2025).
His scholarship in the history of technology includes “The Help Desk: Changing Images of Product Support in Personal Computing, 1975–1990,” published in Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society, edited by Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).
Halvorson also teaches and writes about video games, historical storytelling, and media culture, including interdisciplinary work that explores how games shape public understandings of history, ethics, identity, and technological change.
In 2017, Halvorson co-founded PLU’s Innovation Studies program to encourage interdisciplinary thinking about technology, creativity, entrepreneurship, and social change. He served as the program’s inaugural director from 2017 to 2024 and continues to teach courses that connect historical interpretation, media culture, innovation, and public problem-solving.
From 2016 to 2026, he was also Benson Family Chair of Business and Economic History at PLU, responsible for organizing the annual Dale E. Benson Lecture and organizing student-faculty research fellowships in history, economics, media studies, and related disciplines.
Michael Halvorson’s research bibliography is available at: