About

World-class wordsmithing.
Superlative storytelling.
Expert historical research.

Allison Miller is a journalist and historian who specializes in the history of women, gender, and sexuality. After several years as a writer and editor for national fashion and pop culture magazines, she began graduate studies in American history, earning a Ph.D. from Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Her dissertation, “Boyhood for Girls,” is a study of tomboys growing up during the Jazz Age. 

Her editorial and academic experience led her to the American Historical Association, the nation’s oldest professional organization for historians. At the AHA, Allison was editor of the storied magazine Perspectives on History. She introduced reported news and feature stories to the editorial mix, trained staff to report and fact-check articles, and enlivened a publication to make it a must-read for historians. Numerous historians who have written for such venues as The Washington Post and Smithsonian got their first public-facing clips writing for Allison in Perspectives. In addition to writing a monthly editor’s column and features, she also oversaw the magazine’s print and digital relaunch. 

More recently, Allison was associate editor of JSTOR Daily, a digital magazine devoted to intellectual and cultural journalism, where she also handled the publication’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. She recruited and mentored a diverse roster of freelancers, covering history, politics, literature, classics, science, climate and sustainability, pop culture, and even mathematics. She is currently contributing her editing skills to the newsroom at Bloomberg.

Allison’s freelance work has included developmental editing, copy editing, fact checking, and proofreading for trade and academic nonfiction authors, in subjects ranging from the Reagan administration to early-modern herbal remedies. She has also applied her historical training to research for prestige TV. Her academic writing has appeared in the pathbreaking interdisciplinary journal Representations and an anthology dedicated to the queer child. She has reported on lesbian parthenogenesis, faculty wives, the auction of the photography archive of Ebony and Jet magazines, and the changing cultural significance of Joan of Arc.

Allison has given talks to humanities graduate students about career pathways after the Ph.D., encouraging them to explore nonacademic options and providing advice on navigating life beyond the professoriate. In addition to lecturing and leading a seminar at Oxford University, she’s also presented at national academic conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the American Studies Association.

A passionate urban stroller, Allison is also a rare-book collector, with a focus on first editions of twentieth-century psychological and medical studies related to queer life.