Bernie Herman

Contact Information

Greenlaw Hall 226, CB #3520
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
(919) 962-4063
blherman@email.unc.edu

Education

Ph.D. Folklore and Folklife, University of Pennsylvania, 1978
B.A. English, College of William and Mary, 1973

Research Interests

Bernie Herman, George B. Tindall Professor of American Studies, joined the American Studies, Folklore, and Art faculty in 2009 after a distinguished career at the University of Delaware where he taught in Art History, History, Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and Material Culture Studies and co-founded two interdisciplinary research centers on material culture and historic preservation and architectural documentation.

Herman teaches courses on visual and material culture, contemporary craft and traditional arts, writing material culture, Southern studies, architectural history, folklife, and objects in everyday life. He works with students on hands-on research projects leading to public engagement through publications and exhibitions. His seminar projects include Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper, an exhibition and catalog scheduled for 2012 at the University of North Carolina’s Ackland Museum of Art.

In 2011 he held a Guggenheim Fellowship for his current book project, Troublesome Things: In the Borderlands of Contemporary Art, focused on contemporary self-taught and outsider arts and craft. Drawing on oral histories with artists including Charles Benefiel, Ellen Kochansky, Thornton Dial, Dennis Callwood, and Lonnie Holley, Troublesome Things explores qualities of transparency, veiling, narrative, and trouble revealed in all objects through powerful and provocative works of art.

His books include Architecture and Rural Life in Central Delaware 1700-1900, The Stolen House, and Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1760-1830—each awarded the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award as the best book on North American vernacular architecture. He has published essays on quilts, self-taught and outsider arts, foodways, historical archaeology, vernacular photography, and theoretical approaches to the study and interpretation of objects. In 2011 he completed an essay on “Uncollectible/Uncollected Craft” for the 40<40: Craft Futures exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery.

His ongoing writing projects include Quilt Spaces, an oral history based exploration of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, quilts and quiltmakers, and a history of first-period (1675-1740) Delaware Valley houses from the falls at Trenton to the Capes of Delaware.