07/06/2022

Stacy A. Cordery

July/August Featured Member

As professor of History at Iowa State University, Stacy A. Cordery an award-winning teacher, respected author, and popular talking head. Before moving to Ames in 2016 she served as professor and chair of the History Department at Monmouth College, where she won the institution’s only teaching award a record four times. Last academic year, she was the Dennis and Vaune Johnson Endowed Chair in Theodore Roosevelt Studies and the director of the TR Honors Leadership Program at Dickinson State University in Dickinson, North Dakota. 

Cordery earned her doctoral degree at the University of Texas at Austin, where she worked with Lewis L. Gould, the founder of the modern study of First Ladies. As an undergraduate she took the first university-level course on First Ladies, taught by Gould, and did research on Eleanor Roosevelt and Anna Pennybacker, locating previously unknown correspondence between the two in the American Research Center at UT. Her dissertation on the life of Alice Roosevelt Longworth formed the basis for her biography, Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker (Viking Books, 2007), a New York Times Notable Book.

She is also the author of Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts (Viking, 2012) and two books about Theodore Roosevelt. She has spoken at the White House Historical Association’s Presidential Sites Summit, the Wilson Center, the Jefferson Educational Forum, the National Constitution Center, the Miller Center, Printers Row Lit Fest, and the Savannah Book Festival. Her media appearances include C-SPAN, CNN, the Diane Rehm Show, and National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition. She was recently featured on the History Channel’s two-part miniseries on Theodore Roosevelt and on the Smithsonian Channel’s television series “First Ladies Revealed” speaking about Edith Roosevelt in the White House. She is currently under contract with Viking/Penguin for a biography of American entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden, whose clients included Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy.

For eighteen years, Dr. Cordery served as the web bibliographer for the National First Ladies Library. Her first lady expertise is on First Ladies of the Progressive Era, especially Edith Kermit Roosevelt. For more information, please see www.stacycordery.com.

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