Michael Meyer is Professor of English and Faculty Electus member of the Honors College at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches journalism and nonfiction writing and received the 2023 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award. He earned his BS in Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, MA in Education from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed programs in advanced Chinese studies at National Taiwan University in Taipei and Tsinghua University in Beijing. Meyer was previously a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong, and, in 1995, one of the first Peace Corps volunteers sent to China.

Meyer is the author of A Dirty, Filthy Book: Sex, Scandal, and One Woman’s Fight in the Victorian Trial of the Century (Penguin UK and Harvard US, 2024); Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet: The Favorite Founder’s Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity (HarperCollins, 2022); The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up (Bloomsbury, 2017); In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China (Bloomsbury, 2015); and The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed (Bloomsbury, 2008). Meyer’s journalism has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, Smithsonian, Slate, Foreign Policy, and on NPR’s This American Life. A Fulbright Scholar, Guggenheim fellow, and Whiting Award winner, Meyer has also received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, Bellagio, MacDowell, and University of Oxford’s Centre for Life-Writing.