Michael David Cohen is a research professor in the Department of Government and a faculty fellow in the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. He serves as editor of the Correspondence of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore project. From 2009 to 2019, at the University of Tennessee, he was assistant editor and then editor of the James K. Polk Project. Besides three volumes of the Correspondence of James K. Polk, he has published Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War and the forthcoming James K. Polk and His Time: Essays at the Conclusion of the Polk Project. He has spoken about the Polk family on the Voice of America and supplied research to the writers of Jeopardy!