Dr. Martha Joynt Kumar is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Towson University. As a scholar with a research focus on the White House, she is interested in presidential – press relations, White House communications operations, and presidential transitions. Her most recent book, Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation, won the 2008 Richard E. Neustadt Award for the best book on the presidency from the presidency section of the American Political Science Association. Her previous books involving White House operations include Portraying the President: The White House and the News Media and White House World: Transitions, Organization, and Office Operations. She has also published a variety of articles on presidency subjects, including ones found in Presidential Studies Quarterly, the Harvard International Journal of Press / Politics, Public Administration Review, and Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to the Presidency.

She is currently director of the White House Transition Project, and is at work with two dozen presidency scholars preparing information on White House operations for people inside and outside of government interested in the 2009 presidential transition. The nonpartisan project is providing information on past presidential transitions through 2001, the organization of eleven key White House offices, and the environment of White House operations.

The group’s work is available at: http://whitehousetransitionproject.org. The project builds on the earlier White House 2001 Project, which was designed to build an institutional memory for seven White House offices in order to provide the information to new staff coming into the selected positions in 2001. The White House 2001 Project was funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and was associated with the Transition to Governing Project of the American Enterprise Institute.

Professor Kumar has received grants from the Ford Foundation as well as The Pew Charitable Trusts. In 1998 she was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press Politics at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. Professor Kumar was named by the University System of Maryland to be a Wilson H. Elkins Professor for 2003-2004 and again for 2005-2006 to support her work on presidential communications and to fund an interactive course she has taught each spring beginning in 2004: “White House Communications Operations.”

She interviews White House officials and reporters in Washington with her students back at Towson hooked in through an internet connection. In the five years she has taught the course, she has interviewed over 50 reporters and officials. The interviews are videostreamed nationwide and available at: http://www.ucdc.edu/aboutus/whstreaming_archive.cfm. The Wilson H. Elkins grants also funded her work on presidential press conferences.

She is a member of the boards and of the executive committees of the White House Historical Association and the National Coalition for History.

Kumar grew up in the Washington area where she went to school at St. Agnes followed by Connecticut College for her BA in government and then an MA and a PhD in political science from Columbia University. In between her masters and doctoral degrees, she taught at Tennessee State University in Nashville and worked as a researcher in the Election Unit of the News Department at NBC.

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