Name: Amy Wilson
Email: amy.wilson@nyu.edu
Program: History of Education
Research Interests: 20th Century U.S. Metropolitan and Political History; School Finance; Civic and Social Studies Education; International and Higher Education
Principal Advisor(s): James Fraser, Diana Turk, Andrew Needham
Research Description/Bio: Amy is a doctoral candidate and an adjunct instructor in the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science and Humanities. Her dissertation explores school finance, municipal governance, and metropolitan inequality in postwar Massachusetts. She has served as a graduate assistant to Professor James W. Fraser, and for the Steinhardt Arts & Humanities Working Group. She has also contributed research to Professor L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy’s work on the links between segregated schooling and affordable housing in Westchester County, and is a member of the History of Education Graduate Student Council
Before her doctoral studies, Amy earned a MA from NYU Steinhardt and a BA from Loyola University Maryland.
Selected Publications, Presentations, and Awards:
- “Review: Tracy Steffes, Structuring Inequality: How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education,” History of Education Quarterly, 65:4 (December 2025).
- Co-edited A Student’s Search for Meaning: Reflections on the Intersections of College Chaplaincy, Liberal Arts, and the University, with James W. Fraser, Cambridge: Ethics International Press, 2023.
- Select conference panels including “Archival Challenges in the History of Education: Limits, Omissions, and Fragmentation” for the History of Education Society 2025 meeting and “A Roundtable on the New History of School Finance” for the History of Education Society 2023 Meeting, and conference presentations including “When Raytheon Comes to Town: Constructing the Postwar Suburban Community” for the Urban History Association 2023 meeting; "’Affordable’ Does Not Mean Low-Income: Housing and School Policy in Postwar Metropolitan Boston,” for the 2023 Organization of American Historians Conference; and “School Choice in Postwar Suburbia” for the History of Education Society 2021 meeting.
- Organization of American Historians Merrill Graduate Student Grant, 2023; Essence of Steinhardt Award, NYU Steinhardt Research Showcase, 2021.
- Chair, “Questions of Citizenship in American Schooling;” Panelist, “Archival Challenges in the History of Education: Limits, Omissions, and Fragmentation Across Federal, State, Metropolitan, and Local Settings” for the History of Education Society 2025 meeting;
- Chair, The Promise and Peril of Social Media and the Virtual World for Historians of Education History of Education Society 2023 Meeting
- OAH 2026 Educational Struggle as Democracy: Localism, Community, and Empire in US Public Education at 250” 2026 Organization of American Historians Conference