01/05/2026

Sharon Williams Leahy

FLARE Secretary

Sharon Williams Leahy is an independent scholar and historian specializing in nineteenth-century America, particularly print culture and American first ladies.

Leahy earned her undergraduate degree in Landscape Architecture from Louisiana State University and an MA degree in Historic Preservation from the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she wrote a thesis entitled “The Architectural Inheritance of the Burned-Over District.”

She is the co-author (with her husband, Christopher J. Leahy) of the forthcoming book from the University Press of Kansas, Presidentess: The Life of First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler.  Her other scholarly publications include: “Not a Model: First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler and New York City’s Print Culture,” New York History 99 (Summer/Fall 2018): 331-355, and, in collaboration with Christopher J. Leahy, an article on the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University, as well as two essays for books: “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).

Leahy has presented portions of her work at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, and she has appeared on C-SPAN to discuss her scholarship on the connection between Julia Gardiner Tyler, political cartoons, and the presidential election of 1844.  She has also been interviewed for East Wing Magazine.