In Memoriam: Bernard L. Herman

Bernard L. Herman, renowned scholar, author and professor emeritus of American material culture at the University of Delaware, died of a cerebral hemorrhage on Dec. 30, 2024. He was 73.

David Shields, Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina, called him "an internationally renowned scholar of material culture studies, vernacular architecture, outsider art and southern foodways."

In a tribute on the American Society of Americanists listserv, Shields wrote, "A theoretician of aesthetics as well as an historian of art, architecture and material culture, [Dr. Herman] ranged between disciplines and produced a number of influential and prize-winning books characterized by an impatience with prevailing historiographies, scholarly genres and archives. His intellectual restlessness and openness was married with a profound care for people, particularly his informants, his students and his colleagues. The combination of critical incisiveness and palpable concern of the ideas and feelings of others made his graduate workshops at the University of Delaware and the University of North Carolina life-transformative experiences for numbers of his students."