After earning her PhD, Johnson taught at the University of Michigan.[3] 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.[5] She was promoted from assistant to Associate Professor of Organizational Studies in 2011.[6] Johnson eventually left the University of Michigan to join the faculty of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College.[7] During the 2015–16 academic term, she was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.[8]
Johnson was a Mellon Visiting Scholar at The New York Botanical Garden’s Humanities Institute in 2016, where she conducted research on David Hosack.[9] After her first proposal was rejected for being "too academic,"[10] she published a biography of David Hosack in 2018 titled "American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic."[11] Her book was subsequently nominated for the National Book Award for Nonfiction,[12]Pulitzer Prize for History,[13][14] and LA Times Book Prize.[15] The following year, she received the 2019 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize[16] and was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize.[17]
^Santoro, Marco (January 22, 2010). "Book review: Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime". Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. 39 (1): 50–52. doi:10.1177/0094306109356659y. S2CID145599090.
