Stacy A. Cordery
I find people endlessly fascinating—their choices, their justifications, their joys and sorrows, their innate nobility. John Donne was right of course; no man (or woman) is an island.* When one interesting individual intersects with larger social forces then historical biography is born. Elizabeth Arden, Juliette Gordon Low, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and Theodore Roosevelt lived very different lives, yet all contributed to the fabric of American society and to the broader world in important and intriguing ways. They all had marvelously complicated inner worlds as well as family and intimate friends who supported, challenged, and betrayed them.
The job of the historian is not to lobby for or against the subject of her research, but to attempt to treat as objectively as possible both the documentary evidence and the final analysis. If I can do that while recreating the desires and fears, the antipathies and passions of my subjects, then I will have succeeded. I am honored to have you read my biographies, and I am always glad to hear from you.
In 2016 I moved to my current position as professor of History at Iowa State University. From 1994 to 2016 I taught at Monmouth College where I served as everything from department chair to faculty senator to Pi Beta Phi advisor. I even stepped back on the stage as Macbeth, in a gender-switched version of Shakespeare’s great play. I was deeply honored to have earned Monmouth College’s only teaching award four times. I have contributed to the historical profession in my work with the American Historical Association’s Teaching Committee, the Theodore Roosevelt Association, Women and Gender Historians of the Midwest, H-Women, H-HistMajor, and the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, among others. I served for almost two decades as the web bibliographer for the National First Ladies Library and was the first Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University in North Dakota. I continue to consult with Dickinson State as we work to create the definitive digital archive of all Roosevelt-related documents.
Writing is hard work. For me, the joy comes from teaching and speaking. I’ve been privileged to address audiences of all sorts, from platforms which included NPR, the History Channel, Smithsonian TV, Anderson Cooper 360°, and C-SPAN, and at venues such as the Wilson Center, the Constitution Center, the Miller Center, and the Society of the Cincinnati. Interacting with people—in the classroom, in the public lecture, at the book club—is the fun reward for the solitary researching and writing!
I’m represented by literary agent Laurie Liss. She can be reached at laurie@sll.com.
My editor at Viking/Penguin is Emily Wunderlich.