Henry Glassie Award

2025 Bernard L. Herman 

Remarks given by Jeff Klee at the 2025 Delaware Conference 

This year, I am proud to report that the VAF gives the Glassie Award to Bernard L. Herman (1951-2024).

A conventional retrospective would have recited his professional accomplishments, including his ludicrous record of publications across a huge range of academic fields, and his service to the VAF, which included organizing the first Delaware conference 41 years ago. Bernie was there at the beginning, when the proto-VAF was known as the Friends of Friendless Farm Buildings. And he was very much there as the VAF found its footing as a venue for serious conversations about the built environment, editing two of the first five volumes of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, writing the most useful instruction manual for fieldwork, and publishing three additional books on early American architecture, all of them winning the Cummings Award. Most of us would give our left kidney to achieve that much in a lifetime and he did it all by the time he was 54 years old.  

But it was just a first act. His second act started in 2009, after he became chair of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina, where he indulged his long-standing interests in outsider art and southern food. As his research turned toward the creativity of the living, he was a less conspicuous presence at VAF conferences and his absence has made those meetings a little less lively and a little less amusing.

A conventional resume of Bernie’s career would continue to celebrate how he mentored a generation of students who have grown up to lead this organization, including Louis Nelson, Susan Garfinkel, Anna Andrzejewski, Gabrielle Lanier, Cindy Falk, Jeroen van den Hurk, Sherri Marsh, and 55 others from various programs at Delaware. Reciting all of this would discharge my basic obligation as an awards presenter but would fall far short of articulating what was singular, and significant, about Bernie Herman. Because the most distinctive and exceptional part of Bernie was not his intelligence or his work ethic but his essential humanity—his sense of humor, his faith in the decency of people, and his disdain for easy answers to simplistic questions. He inspired generations of scholars to look harder to identify the poetry that was all around them. 

Poetry, or “Poetics,” was a favorite image of Bernie’s. Sometimes he used this in the conventional way, referring to the rhythmic and metaphoric arrangement of words. But Bernie recognized poetry everywhere: in the built environment; in the snap of a well-told joke; in the careful seasoning of a stew; and in the little assemblages he started creating for his wife, Becky, late in life. Identifying the poetics of the everyday took effort and a keen eye. It’s easy enough to recognize the poetics in Borromini’s chapels; it takes real skill to find it in the barns of Lancaster County. It takes creativity, too, and a certain sensibility; an openness to the strange and the awkward and a desire to celebrate the overlooked and under-appreciated. This attitude is surely why he had such an affinity for graduate students.

A point that is lost in emphasizing Bernie’s brilliance and productivity is that his academic career was just one part of his life. It wasn’t that community engagement and student advising were in service to his career; if anything, it was the other way around. Scholarship in the conventional sense of peer-reviewed publications wasn’t the center of his life, it was just one part of his larger, enormous self. 

Bernie was an exceptionally productive author but it was important to him to do work whose worth wasn’t measured in the quantity of citations. He devoted much of his time to sustaining the culinary traditions of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, cultivating an orchard of heirloom figs and personally re-seeding some of the oyster beds of the Chesapeake Bay. When a working-class neighborhood of Newark, Delaware was threatened with demolition, Bernie wrote a book documenting its history and culture; he followed this with another, celebrating the neighborhood’s home cooks and preserving their recipes.

As this example illustrates, Bernie was generous. Generous with his expertise, his knowledge, and his skills, certainly, but also with his things. At his retirement, he gave me the staggering gift of his architectural library, 37 boxes of books. Other gifts were more ephemeral, but their rewards just as durable: to me, one was a week spent with Bernie surveying small houses on the North Shore of Boston, a formative experience. To a young Louis Nelson, he gave the update of National Register Nominations for 18^th century houses in Delaware. And to Gabrielle Lanier, he gave co-authorship of a book on fieldwork. In all of these projects, he threw his students into the deep end of the methodological pool so that we could discover for ourselves that we had the skills we needed to stay afloat in this field.

Bernie relished recruiting and advising graduate students, whether they were interested in Baroque prints or American genre paintings or Zuni pueblo. To him, what counted was not the subject matter but the quality of the questions that we were asking. He did not set out to become an expert in early American architecture; he set out to indulge his curiosity and to stimulate curiosity in others. Nonetheless, some regarded him a little warily, supposing that he was just another middle-aged leftist in Doc Martins. And quite a few found his casual use of the language of critical theory off-putting. But that, too, was an expression of esteem: the message here was, “you are intelligent; I respect you as a peer,” even if the result was the student hustling off to consult the Encyclopedia of Semiotics. A few students took to referring to him as Bernie Hermeneutics. His linguistic performances on the page, in the classroom, and in the hallway were above all an invitation—an invitation to a conversation about objects, politics, and the social world.

His most valuable advice to students didn’t concern getting through the foundational literature, developing a method, writing a successful fellowship application, or any of the other basics. He knew that we’d figure that out on our own and he would re-direct us if he spotted us wandering too far into the desert. He urged us to read fiction, and poetry, and archaeology. He especially liked Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, a recommendation that too few of us took up. 

But this was another invitation; an invitation to an expanded view of the world, to other possibilities besides the comfortable, collegiate outlook that had us all striving for some version of the same thing: good recommendations from our teachers and a solid GPA, with peer-reviewed publications and a tenure-track appointment on the horizon. Bernie’s invitation, both to his students and to his peers, was to have a little courage; to broaden our outlook; to find kinship with people where it wasn’t expected; to open ourselves up to others.

His invitation, in short, was to a life whose goals were understanding and empathy not personal comfort and professional standing.  But it was also to a life filled with manifold pleasures: intense art and fresh oysters and heirloom figs and outrageous stories and complex poetry and friendless farm buildings. My scholarship is better; and my life is better because I accepted that invitation.

So thank you, Bernie, for all of it.