BIOGRAPHY: David Abrahamson is a Professor Emeritus at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He was the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research (2015), a definitive anthology of magazine scholarship; 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 American Magazine: Research Perspectives and Prospects (Iowa State University Press, 1995). The founder of Medill's Literary Journalism seminar, he also taught magazine writing and magazine editing and was co-director of the graduate Magazine Publishing Project from 1994 to 2002. Beyond Medill, he was 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. An active member of a number of learned societies, he is a founder and past president of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS) and served as head of both the the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication's (AEJMC) History Division (2002-2003) and its Magazine Division (1997-1998). In addition, he is the past winner of the Magazine Division's Educator of the Year Award, as well as the Sidney Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism History from the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA). He was awarded Emeritus status on January 1, 2020.
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 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Literary Journalism Studies, American Journalism, Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, Journalism History and Media Studies Journal. His journalistic efforts have won a number of awards, including the Ken Purdy Memorial Award for Automotive Journalism.
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 (also in a mercifully condensed version) in downloadable form.