Keuka College Professor Dr. Chris Leahy to Discuss Nation’s 10th President During LBJ Library Forum

Dr. Leahy, author of “President without a Party: The Life of John Tyler,” is one of six national scholars taking part in the prestigious series.


Thursday, February 3, 2022

Keuka College Professor of History Dr. Chris Leahy is once again preparing to address a national audience.

Just months after a presentation by Dr. Leahy was broadcast on C-SPAN, he’ll take part in an online discussion hosted by the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library on Wednesday, Feb. 9, at 5 p.m. (EST). The topic of both forums: President John Tyler, whose life and career Dr. Leahy documented in his recent biography, “President without a Party: The Life of John Tyler.”

During the Zoom webinar, which is open to the public (free registration is required), Dr. Leahy will take part in a moderated discussion led by LBJ Library Director Mark Lawrence. There will also be questions from the audience.

The 75-minute discussion is one of six separate sessions that make up the series, “The Presidents: The Lives Behind the Legends,” which is co-sponsored by the LBJ Library and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the University of Texas at Austin.

“President without a Party,” published in 2020, was the first comprehensive biography of Tyler in some 80 years. The Wall Street Journal called it a “deeply researched, gracefully written reappraisal” of the nation’s 10th president – the first to ascend to the Oval Office from the vice presidency.

In being selected for the LBJ Library series, Dr. Leahy is in select company: two of the other participating authors – Frederik Logevall, who spoke on John F. Kennedy, and Annette Gordon-Reed, who discussed Thomas Jefferson – have won the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Dr. Leahy, who has taught at Keuka College for 15 years, is a nationally recognized expert on the U.S. presidency and 18th- and 19th-century American politics. He is the author of numerous journal articles and scholarly reviews, and is currently at work on a biography of John Tyler’s wife, Julia Gardiner Tyler, to be co-authored with his wife, Sharon Williams Leahy.