Michael Meyer

Michael's Affiliations: Asian Studies Center, Frederick Honors College

Michael Meyer went to China in 1995 as one of its first Peace Corps volunteers. As the author of the acclaimed The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, he received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction, followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship. His second book, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China won a Lowell Thomas Award for Best Travel Book from the Society of American Travel Writers, as did the third book in his China trilogy, The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up. His fourth book, Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet: The Favorite Founder’s Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity, was published by Mariner/HarperCollins in 2022. In 2023, when Meyer delivered the commencement address at the Boston trades school that stars in the book it awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree. Meyer’s latest work of nonfiction, A Dirty, Filthy Book (WH Allen/Penguin). details Annie Besant’s obscenity trial in Victorian London over her defiant publication of an American birth control pamphlet. A film adaptation is underway.

Meyer’s stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Architectural Record, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Iowa Review, the Paris Review, and on National Public Radio’s This American Life. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award and residencies at MacDowell, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, and the University of Oxford’s Centre for Life-Writing. He is a fellow of the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program and is affiliated faculty with Pitt's Asian Studies Center. He was recently a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan.

Winner of the 2023 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, Meyer is currently Faculty Electus member of the Frederick Honors College, where he teaches intensive nonfiction writing courses that use Pittsburgh as a classroom. As Pitt’s first winner of a Berlin Prize, in 2024 Meyer was in residence at the American Academy in Berlin, working on a biography of Taiwan.

2023 Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award Recipient

Links

Meyer’s writing and teaching methods were profiled in the Association of Writing Programs Writer's Chronicle.

Listen to an excerpt of In Manchuria on This American Life.And watch Meyer talking about Benjamin Franklin’s gift to working-class Americans at the U.S. National Archives, or explaining Taiwan at the American Academy in Berlin. You can also listen to him talk about Annie Besant on the BBC.

Among his favorite stories is this interview with the legendary literary agent Georges Borchardt.