BIOGRAPHY: David Abrahamson is a Professor of Journalism and the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The founder of Medill's Literary Journalism seminar, he also teaches magazine writing and magazine editing and was co-director of the graduate Magazine Publishing Project from 1994 to 2002. Beyond Medill, he is the general editor of a multi-volume historical series, "Visions of the American Press," published under the Medill imprint by the Northwestern University Press, and served as the director of the Northwestern University Center for the Writing Arts from 2002 to 2006. From 2002 to 2005 he held the Helen G. Brown Research Professorship in Journalism.
He is the author of Magazine-Made America: The Cultural Transformation of the Postwar Periodical (Hampton Press, 1996), an interpretive history of the magazine profession since World War II, and editor of the definitive anthology of magazine scholarship, The American Magazine: Research Perspectives and Prospects (Iowa State University Press, 1995). In addition, he is a special editor of the Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication and is the founder of MAGAZINE, a national electronic conference on magazine journalism and publishing. He is currently working on a book-length project exploring the future of print.
With over two decades of experience as a magazine writer, editor and management consultant, Abrahamson's background includes senior editorial positions at a number of national consumer magazines, including Car and Driver and PC/Computing. Over the years, his management consulting practice has served many of the nation's most prominent magazine publishing enterprises. His areas of expertise include start-up conceptualization and management, strategic repositioning and new media development, and he has lectured on editorial management topics at the Folio: conferences in New York and Chicago. As a practicing journalist, his articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Science and Playboy, as well as in scholarly journals such as Media Studies Journal, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, American Journalism and Journalism & Mass Communication Educator. His journalistic efforts have won a number of awards, including the Ken Purdy Memorial Award for Automotive Journalism. An active member of a number of professional associations, he is currently the President-Elect of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS) and has, since 1997, chaired the Margaret A. Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Prize Committee of the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA). He has served as the Head of both the History Division (2002-2003) and the Magazine Divison (1997-1998) of the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).
Raised in Annapolis, MD, Abrahamson holds a B.A. in History from Johns Hopkins University (1969), a Master's degree in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley (1973) and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University (1992). For more detailed information, Abrahamson's curriculum vitae is available in downloadable form.