David B. Woolner is Professor of History at Marist College, Senior Fellow and Resident Historian of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, and Senior Fellow of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College. He is the author of The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace (forthcoming from Basic Books), and is editor/co-editor of five books, including Progressivism in America: Past Present and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), FDR’s World: War, Peace and Legacies (Palgrave, 2008), and FDR the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church in America, 1933-1945 (Palgrave 2003).
Dr. Woolner has been awarded the Mary Ball Washington Chair in American History at University College Dublin for 2016-2017, and in the spring of 2016 was granted the first Roosevelt Fellowship by University College Roosevelt in Middelburg, the Netherlands. He held the Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair at the Roosevelt Study Center located in Middelburg (fall 2010), and an Archives bi-fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge (fall 2007).
In the summer of 2016, Woolner was named the Academic Director for the Study of the United States Summer Institute, a six-week program sponsored by the U.S. State Department that brings 18 scholars (each nominated by the US embassy in their home country) from around the world to study the history, formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy. Woolner has also been Visiting Associate Professor of History at Bard College, and remains on the faculty of the Bard Prison Initiative. In 2001-2003, he served as the principle organizer of a project entitled “Contemporary Russia and the New Deal,” a two year program funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York that explored the relevance of the New Deal to contemporary Russia in the wake of the 1998 financial crisis. Woolner serves on the Editorial Board of the International History Review; is the series editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s The World of the Roosevelts, and is a member of the Advisory Group to the Churchill Archives Project. He is a frequent contributor of book reviews and editorials to the Irish Times, Huffington Post, Salon.com, and The Nation.com and has conducted interviews with the BBC, CNN, NPR, CBC, Al Jazeera, Izvestia, the New York Times, and Washington Post, among others. He has also served as a historical consultant for a number of documentary and feature films, including Ken Burns’ The Roosevelts, as well as historical advisor for the exhibits at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum.
From 2000 to 2009, Dr. Woolner served as the Roosevelt Institute’s Executive Director, overseeing a significant expansion of the organization’s budget, programmatic dimension and staff. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in history from McGill University and a B.A. summa cum laude in English Literature and History from the University of Minnesota.
