I’m Mary Mahoney, a historian and podcaster who explores pop culture, memory, and the stories we tell about the things we love. My work connects the past to the present using television, celebrity culture, media, and questions about nostalgia to make sense of how history shows up in everyday life.

I write and produce Landline, a newsletter and podcast about pop culture with context. The whole thing grew out of my background in history and a long-standing belief that pop culture matters, especially if you think about it with footnotes.

What I Do

Landline (Newsletter & Podcast)

Every week, I publish a newsletter and companion podcast that’s the answer to the question, “Why can’t history feel more like US Weekly?” I love to dig into stories behind topics that shape our lives and the pop culture we pursue. Listeners can find episodes that offer deep dives on a range of otpics, “nostalgia tour” episodes the investigate subjects of our pop culture obsession to ask what it did for us then and what it’s doing for us now, and future history episodes where I invite a guest to discuss a pop culture topic they’re obsessed with that week and its future uses by historians (aka what will it say about us??)

Topics range from millennial history, queer history, women’s history, explorations of our own nostalgia, and more.

Classes & Workshops

I teach live, small-group workshops that combine historical research, creative practice, and making things with your hands. These aren’t lecture courses or productivity bootcamps. They’re guided experiences designed to help people finish a project that actually means something to them.

Recent and upcoming classes explore genealogy as creative practice, paper dolls as biographical storytelling, archives, memory, and speculative history, and bibliotherapy and memoir. This is a course that invites participants to think about how reading has been used therapeutically in the past and to reflect on their own lives as readers through memoir writing.

My teaching style emphasizes fun, learning basic research skills, respect for emotional and archival limits, and reclaiming nostalgia and craft as serious work. If you’ve ever wanted someone to say, “Yes, that’s worth making, and here’s how,” this is probably your lane.

Consulting & Collaboration

I also work with cultural organizations, nonprofits, museums, and small creative businesses on projects that need research, strategy, and a strong editorial point of view. This work often includes digital storytelling, advising on programming and fellowship programs, content and audience strategy, and long-term editorial projects.

How I Got Here

I hold a Ph.D. in History (my doctoral research focused on the history of bibliotherapy, or the use of books as medicine) and spent years working in higher education and digital scholarship, where I focused on research, writing, and project-based digital production. Over time, I became more interested in reaching people outside the academy; people who are thoughtful, culturally engaged, and curious, but not especially interested in academia.

Landline is the result of that shift. It’s a space where historical thinking meets everyday media, and where curiosity matters more than credentials.