Russell Riley

Russell Riley

E-mail:

Phone: 434-982-2740

Russell Riley is an associate professor and chair of the Miller Center's Presidential Oral History Program. He studied at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and then received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was a research assistant at the Miller Center. He subsequently taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University. He helped found Penn's Washington Semester Program and from 1994 to 1998 was its resident director and a lecturer in American politics.

From 1998 to 2000, he was an academic program director with the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in Salzburg, Austria. He returned to the Miller Center in January 2001.

View his curriculum vitae.

Miller Center Projects

At the Miller Center, Russell Riley is part of a team of scholars running the Center's Presidential Oral History Program. His principal current responsibility is the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project. He also conducted the Center's biographical oral history of Washington lawyer Lloyd N. Cutler and organized and directed the White House Congressional Affairs symposium.

Selected Publications

• "Presidential Oral History: The Clinton Presidential History Project." Oral History Review (Summer/Fall 2007).
• "Divided We Stand." The Politico (January 31, 2007).
• "For History's Sake, Nothing Like a Paper Trail." Washington Post (November 6, 2005).
• The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Nation-keeping from 1831–1965 (Columbia University Press, 1999). Cited by the Neustadt Award Committee of the Presidency Research Group (APSA) as one of four outstanding books on the presidency published in 1999.
• "The Presidency, Leadership, and Race," in Stanley Renshon, ed., One America? Leadership, National Identity, and the Dilemmas of Diversity (Georgetown, 2001).
• "The Limits of the Transformational Presidency," in Kumar, Jacobs, and Shapiro, eds., Presidential Power: Forging the Presidency for the 21st Century (Columbia, 2000).
• "Party Government and the Contract with America," PS: Political Science and Politics (December 1995).

He is currently working on a book manuscript examining the post-Cold War presidency as a typical instance in American history of post-crisis contraction in presidential standing. His long-term interests include a comparative study of union-building in the United States and the European Union.