Victoria Johnson

Victoria Johnson (born 1969) is an American author and historian. She is an Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College.

Johnson was born and raised in Ithaca, New York. She attended Yale University for her Bachelor of Arts degree andColumbia University for a PhD in Sociology. Her sister, Elizabeth Kostova, is also an author.

After earning her PhD, Johnson taught at the University of Michigan. While there, she published "Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime" through the University of Chicago Press. She was promoted from assistant to Associate Professor of Organizational Studies in 2011. Johnson eventually left the University of Michigan to join the faculty of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College. During the 2015-16 academic term, she was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Johnson was a Mellon Visiting Scholar at The New York Botanical Garden’s Humanities Institute in 2016, where she conducted research on David Hosack. After her first proposal was rejected for being "too academic," she published a biography of David Hosack in 2018 titled "American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic." Her book was subsequently nominated for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize for History, and LA Times Book Prize. The following year, she received the 2019 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize and was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize.