Michael David Cohen serves as editor and director of the Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. A historian of nineteenth-century America, he holds appointments as a research professor in the Department of Government and as a faculty fellow in the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. In 2019, as the final editor of the James K. Polk Project at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, he completed a decades-long endeavor to publish the eleventh president’s letters. Earlier he worked at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, on the Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. He earned a PhD in history at Harvard University.

Besides three volumes of the Correspondence of James K. Polk (2013–21), Dr. Cohen edited James K. Polk and His Time: Essays at the Conclusion of the Polk Project (2022). His articles on the history of US politics, education, and society and on the editing of historical documents have appeared in journals including The New England Quarterly and The Good Society. His book Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War (2012) won the Critics’ Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association and the Linda Eisenmann Prize from the History of Education Society. Dr. Cohen appeared in a radio documentary about Sarah Childress Polk, the president’s wife, on the Voice of America, and delivered the Annual Presidential Lecture in 2016 (on Polk) and 2022 (on Taylor and Fillmore) at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. An active member of the Association for Documentary Editing, he has chaired several of its committees and served on its council.

Dr. Cohen can be contacted at mdcohen@american.edu. His full cv can be found here.

Amy Larrabee Cotz serves as associate editor of the Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore and as a fellow in the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. Before joining this project, she spent a decade as an editor of the Dolley Madison Digital Edition (DMDE). Completed in 2021, that thirteen-volume edition was the pioneer publication of Rotunda, the digital imprint of the University of Virginia Press. In 2020, the DMDE won the Association for Documentary Editing’s Lyman H. Butterfield Award. Prior to her work at the DMDE, Ms. Larrabee Cotz was a research associate at James Madison’s Montpelier, where her research focused on the enslaved men, women, and children the Madisons held in bondage.

Ms. Larrabee Cotz can be reached at alarrabeecotz@american.edu.

David C. Barker chairs the Taylor-Fillmore project’s advisory board. A professor of government and co-founder of the Program on Legislative Negotiation at American University, he recently became director of the Social and Economic Sciences Division in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation. He helped launch the Taylor-Fillmore project as director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. He is also Co-Principal Investigator of the inter-university New Perspectives in Studies of American Governance program. He studies American political behavior and psychology, American political governance, and electoral politics. He has served as principal investigator on over 50 externally funded research projects, totaling more than $19 million, and he has authored/coauthored over 80 publications–including four books: Rushed to Judgment [2002; Columbia University Press], Representing Red and Blue [2012; Oxford University Press], One Nation, Two Realities [2019; Oxford University Press], and The Politics of Truth in Polarized America [2021; Oxford University Press]. From 2012-2017, he was Professor and Director of the Institute for Social Research at California State University-Sacramento, where he founded CALSPEAKS Opinion Research and co-founded the Public Health Survey Research Program. From 1999-2012, he was a professor of Political Science and Religious Studies at University of Pittsburgh, where he also served as the Director of Graduate Studies. He has held visiting appointments at Science Po in Paris, the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and the University of Sydney.

Dr. Barker’s full cv can be found here.

Cameron Coyle is a volunteer editorial assistant on the Taylor-Fillmore project. He graduated from high school in New Jersey and entered Yale University in fall 2021. He directs the Zachary Taylor Project, which aims to create a historic and educational site preserving and retelling the life and legacy of Taylor, currently the only president without such a site. Cameron served as a high school campaign manager for a town council candidate and as vice president of his high school’s Civics Club. A lacrosse goalie, he was elected team captain as a sophomore and will be playing at Yale. He plans to pursue an undergraduate degree in either government or history.

 

Katelynn A. Hatton, Spanish translator, 2024

David B. Mattern, French translator, 2023–24

Jamshid Mohammadi, editorial assistant, 2023

David J. Gerleman, researcher, 2021–23

Nicholas Breslin, editorial assistant, 2022–23

Gretchen Ohlmacher, intern, 2020; French translator, 2023

Brooke Hadden, Spanish translator, 2023

Emily Obrien, Spanish translator, 2023

Mercedes Atwater, editorial assistant, 2022

Ian Iverson, volunteer editorial assistant, 2022

Alaysia Bookal, editorial assistant, 2021

Brendan Lawlor, intern, 2021

Abigail Peterson, intern, 2021

Leila Rocha Fisher, intern, 2021

Edward Bradley, researcher, 2021

Annika Quinn, intern, 2021

Adele Raymer, intern, 2021

Grace Tamms, intern, 2021

Alexander Pando Kiprof, intern, 2020

Alyssa Moore, intern, 2020

Gabriella A. Siegfried, editorial assistant, 2020

Zoe Golden, intern, 2020