Susan Kern

Susan Kern is Associate Professor and Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She has served as national president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, has served on Design Review Boards and was a team leader for developing and running an international design competition for William & Mary’s award-winning Memorial to the Enslaved. 

Kern sees architecture, landscape, and material culture as social history and is particularly interested in how to read human behavior in the built environment. Her book, The Jeffersons at Shadwell, redefined how historians understand Thomas Jefferson’s earliest home and plantation life. It won the 2011 Abbot Lowell Cummings prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum.

Her current book project examines early 20th-century preservation efforts and their influence on what visitors expect at museums and historic sites, especially as we tell the history of slavery and race in the nation's past. Her project has been supported by research fellowships from the International Center for Jefferson Studies, Library Company of Philadelphia, and Winterthur Museum and Library. 

She holds a Ph.D. in history from the College of William & Mary and a masters in architectural history from the University of Virginia. At UMD, she teaches History, Theory, and Practice of Historic Preservation, Vernacular Architecture, and directs student Final Projects. She particularly likes helping students make good writing better and finding ways their research connects them to scholars and practitioners on our campus and beyond. 

Research interests:

• Vernacular architecture
• Material culture
• Social history
• Museums & public history
• Jefferson Studies

Affiliations:

• Vernacular Architecture Forum
• National Council on Preservation Education
• National Trust for Historic Preservation
• International Council on Monuments and Sites