Margaret Tyndale-Biscoe / Eastman Smith grew up in North America, Asia, and Europe. She has American and British citizenship. She attended university in the United States and is a retired college professor. She currently writes for the website We Are One Humanity (www.weareonehumanity.org). She married Philip Tyndale-Biscoe in 2019 and lives in Washington, DC.
She was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, to parents who devoted their lives, from the time they finished university, to Moral Re-Armament. She worked for the organization herself, as an adult, from 1967 to 1984. Four of those years were in Papua New Guinea, where she was working with women who were navigating the shifting culture of their country as PNG approached independence in 1975. After that she spent four years in Richmond, Virginia, where MRA was engaged in projects to build bridges between the races. Then she moved to Washington, DC, where she was an in-house writer for the organization, producing newsletters, conference invitations and annual reports.
Between 1984 and 1999 she studied history and international relations, and she earned a Ph.D. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1999. Her doctoral research focused on social memory: she studied the ways historical ideas reinforce social divisions but can also be used to mitigate conflict, particularly with reference to Northern Ireland. The research issued in Reckoning with the Past: Teaching History in Northern Ireland (Lexington Books, 2005).
Between 1999 and 2017, as a faculty member of the Program on International Peace and Conflict Resolution at American University in Washington, DC, she taught courses aimed at helping students confront difference and assist in building a more resilient society in places of deep social division. Her areas of teaching have included nationalist and ethnic conflict, uses of memory in politics, and post-conflict reconstruction in deeply divided societies. She has participated in, and written about, a number of projects addressing the role of social memory in rigidifying the boundaries of divided societies and in undergirding democratic ideas.
In August 2026 her second book, A Spectacular Inheritance: What I Kept and What I Left Behind (Sibylline Press, 2026), will be released.
