01/02/2024

Christopher Leahy

FLARE Member-at-large,

Dr. Christopher J. Leahy is Professor of History at Keuka College, a liberal arts institution located in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.

Leahy earned his undergraduate degree in History from Washington and Jefferson College, in Washington, PA; his MA in History from Virginia Tech; and his Ph.D. in History from Louisiana State University, where he worked under the direction of Professor William J. Cooper.

He is the author of President without a Party: The Life of John Tyler (LSU Press, 2020), a biography the Wall Street Journal praised as a “deeply researched, gracefully written reappraisal” of the tenth president.  Leahy has also published scholarly articles and essays on first ladies, including two he co-authored with his wife, Sharon Williams Leahy: “The Ladies of Tippecanoe, and Tyler Too, in A Companion to First Ladies (Wiley Blackwell, 2016) and “Reclamation of a First Lady: Julia Gardiner Tyler’s Pursuit of a Federal Government Pension,” in Southern First Ladies: Culture and Place in White House History (University Press of Kansas, 2020). Currently, he and Sharon Leahy are at work on a biography of First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler, which is under contract with the University Press of Kansas.

An award-winning teacher, as well as a nationally recognized authority on the American presidency and first ladies, Leahy has appeared on C-SPAN and has been an invited participant in the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library Series on Presidential Biography.  He has also discussed his work on numerous podcasts.