Pauline Maier, born in 1938 in St. Paul, Minnesota, is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A popular scholar of the American Revolution, the preceding era and post-revolutionary America, she holds a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College, 1960, was a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics the following year and holds a Phd from Harvard University.

She has published a number of critically acclaimed histories, including From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (1972), The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (1980), and The American People: A History (1986).

Before embarking upon her academic career she was a pupil of historian Bernard Bailyn. She currently serves as an academic advisor to the History News Network.

She is married to Charles S. Maier, Professor of History at Harvard University. Her father was a firefighter and her mother was a homemaker with five children.