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Contributor
Cynthia M. Koch
Public historian in residence, Bard College, and former director, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
Cynthia M. Koch is Public Historian in Residence at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY on assignment from the Office of Presidential Libraries, National Archives and Records Administration. She was Director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, 1999-2011. The Roosevelt Library is the nation’s first presidential library and one of the thirteen federal presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration.
A native of Erie, Pennsylvania, she holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in History from Pennsylvania State University.
Previously Dr. Koch was Associate Director of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community, a national public policy research group at the University of Pennsylvania. She served as Executive Director (1993-1997) of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was Director (1979-1993) of the National Historic Landmark Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, New Jersey, where she led a $10.3 million project of capital restoration and museum development.
Her most recent publication is “Franklin Roosevelt’s Dutchness: At Home in the Hudson Valley” in Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture, ed. Roger Panetta (New York: Hudson River Museum/Fordham University Press, 2009). Her dissertation The Virtuous Curriculum: Schoolbooks and American Culture, 1785-1830 appeared in part as “Teaching Patriotism: Private Virtue for the Public Good in the Early Republic” in Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism, ed. John Bodnar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Other publications include journal articles for Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives and, Parallel, the journal of the Luso-American Foundation, and Forum, the journal of the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums.
She is married and lives in Clinton Corners, New York with her husband, Eliot Werner, president of Eliot Werner Publications, and their two cairn terriers.