Michael David Cohen serves as editor and project 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 His articles on the history of US politics, education, and society and on the editing of historical documents have appeared in journals including The New England Quarterly and The Good Society.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, executive director of the Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, is a professor of government and director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. He was previously director of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at California State University, Sacramento (2012–2017), and associate/assistant professor of political science and religious studies at University of Pittsburgh (1999–2012). He studies political psychology, voting behavior, political communication, legislative behavior and social welfare policy. He has served as principal investigator on over 60 externally funded research projects (totaling more than $16 million). He has authored/coauthored over 80 publications, including three books (Rushed to Judgment [2002; Columbia University Press], Representing Red and Blue [2012; Oxford University Press] and One Nation, Two Realities [2019; Oxford University Press]), and dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles (in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and many others). His current research program seeks to identify the sources of productive political negotiation and compromise. While directing the ISR, he founded CALSPEAKS Opinion Research, the first set of state/local survey panels online to use random probability sampling in California, and co-founded the Public Health Survey Research Program, which collects the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for the state of California and the US Centers for Disease Control. He has served on 25 doctoral dissertation committees, chairing 10 of them, and has received multiple teaching awards. He has held visiting appointments at Science Po, Glasgow University, and University of Sydney.
Dr. Barker can be contacted at dbarker@american.edu. His 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.
Jamshid Mohammadi, an editorial assistant on the Taylor-Fillmore project, is studying comparative politics at American University through Fulbright Scholarships for International Students. Before the fall of US-backed democracy in his country, Jamshid graduated from the American University of Afghanistan and worked within civil society in Afghanistan on issues of peacebuilding and conflict prevention, education and development, and more. Amid the chaotic US withdrawal from his country, he continued to seek pathways to access quality education for his future goals. Jamshid came to the US to attend Bard Globalization and International Affairs certification in New York City in February 2022 and subsequently moved to Bard College to complete his second undergraduate program in political studies. His senior project can be accessed here. He also has interned with Global Action to Prevent War, the Human Rights Office at Bard College, and the American Councils for International Education and attended the Fulbright Pre-Academic Program at Drexel University.
Former Staff
David J. Gerleman, research consultant, 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, research consultant, 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
