Thesis Title: New York, New York: Writing, Saving, and Selling the City, 1967-1977

What Now: Senior Editor at The Atlantic

What Next: As long as it exists, I have no plans to leave magazine journalism!

Follow Me: @AmyWeissMeyer (Twitter)

Being able to choose research topics and craft my own syllabi in History & Literature meant that I could use my coursework to dig deep into magazine history, a longstanding interest of mine. For my sophomore tutorial, I went to Houghton Library to track down the original letters Frederick Jackson Turner's Atlantic editors sent to him as he adapted his frontier theory for popular consumption. My junior paper was about a 1912 series of essays in Harper's Bazar and "new womanhood." Senior year, I did archival research and oral histories for my thesis on the founding of New York magazine and immersed myself in accounts of New York City in the 1960s and 1970s as I worked to understand the cultural context in which the magazine was created. Both my study of these magazines and the skills I learned in the process—how to execute research, think clearly, and write well—prepared me to begin my career as a fact-checker at The Atlantic. I'm now a senior editor at the magazine, where I've put my Hist and Lit degree to good use by editing several features on how history is taught and remembered in the popular imagination. I still jump at any chance to spend time in the archives; I recently got to visit Yale's Beinecke Library to do research for my profile of Judy Blume.


Read More:
• Atlantic author page