GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Folklore, and Babette S. and Bernard J. Tanenbaum Fellow in Jewish History and Culture, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. As a folklorist and ethnologist, she studies the nature and significance of vernacular architecture and ritual practice, particularly in contemporary Jewish communities. Her article, “From Ritual to Protest: Sukkot in the Garden of Hope” (Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2017), received the 2019 Catherine Bishir Prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and is drawn from fieldwork for her book, Framing Sukkot: Tradition and Transformation in Jewish Vernacular Architecture (Indiana University Press, 2017).

GLORIA M. COLOM BRAÑA is a doctoral candidate in the Folklore program at Indiana University, conducting research on the cultural uses of modernist spaces, specifically traditional uses for open-air carports in Puerto Rico. She completed her bachelor’s in Environmental Design at the University of Puerto Rico, and holds a Master’s degree in Historic Preservation from Columbia University, as well as a Master’s degree in Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Having worked in both the public and private sector, she returned to school to explore theoretical concepts of historic preservation and vernacular architecture through the field of Folklore. When not writing, she is either painting, knitting, or mask-sewing.

THOMAS CARTER is professor emeritus of architectural history at the University of Utah’s College of Architecture and Planning. He discovered fieldwork as an undergraduate at Brown University and received folklore degrees from the University of North Carolina and Indiana University. His teaching and research have focused on the vernacular architecture of the western United States. His Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement (University of Minnesota Press 2015) won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum.

MICHAEL J. CHIARAPPA received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is Professor of History at Quinnipiac University. He is co-author of Fish for All: An Oral History of Multiple Claims and Divided Sentiment on Lake Michigan (2003), co-editor of Nature’s Entrepot: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and its Environmental Thresholds (2012) and the author of articles focusing on vernacular architecture and landscapes, and marine environmental history. A graduate of the Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies, he has worked with museums and government agencies on maritime-related programming, including the Bayshore Center at Bivalve, the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Park Service. A former board member of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, he serves on the editorial board of Buildings and Landscapes.

ELIJAH GADDIS is an Assistant Professor of Public History at Auburn University in Alabama. His research focuses on the spatial and material culture of post-Emancipation African American people. He is currently completing a book on lynching and material culture.

HENRY GLASSIE, College Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, is a leading scholar of material culture. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on five continents, publishing eighteen books on the art and architecture of the United States, Brazil, Nigeria, Ireland, Turkey, and Bangladesh. He has served as president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, the American Folklore Society, and has received prestigious lifetime achievement awards from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the American Folklore Society (AFS). His most recent books include Daniel Johnston: A Portrait of the Artist as a Potter in North Carolina (2019) and Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomblè Gods in Modern Brazil (2018), with Pravina Shukla.

BERNARD L. HERMAN is the George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 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 by the Vernacular Architecture Forum. His recent books include edited works Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper and Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett, both accompanying travelling exhibitions organized through the Ackland Art Museum at UNC. 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. His current research projects include an oral history based exploration of Gee’s Bend, Alabama quilts and quiltmakers. He is also working on a history of first-period (1675-1740) Delaware Valley houses from the falls at Trenton to the Capes of Delaware and a collection of essays, Troublesome Things, supported with a Guggenheim Fellowship, that explores themes in contemporary self-taught and outsider arts and craft.

MEGHANN E. JACK received her MA and PhD in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her research interests focus on buildings and landscapes, museums and heritage, and the culture of Atlantic Canada.

GERALD L. POCIUS is University Research Professor Emeritus at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Senior Research Fellow, Cape Breton University. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the American Folklore Society. He has published widely on material culture, vernacular architecture, heritage, folksong, vernacular religion, and traditional health systems. He has curated a number of exhibits, and has worked with various levels of governments on UNESCO intangible cultural heritage policy. For many years he was editor of the journal Material Culture Review. His book, A Place to Belong, was awarded the Chicago Folklore Prize and the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award from the Vernacular Architecture Forum. His current research projects include Regency era townscapes in Newfoundland, 1830s worker’s housing in industrial Cape Breton, and Jewish domestic architecture in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

PUJA SAHNEY has a PhD in Folklore with a minor in American Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. She is currently a full-time teaching instructor in the English Writing Program at Rutgers University. Her research interests include Hindu immigrant women’s domestic religious practices in the United States. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Asian Ethnology, Material Religion: Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, and South Asian History and Culture.  

ROBERT BLAIR ST. GEORGE is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in the history and ethnography of material life, politics and landscape, and exchange relations. He has published widely in these areas, including Material Life in America, 1600-1860 and Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture.

MICHAEL ANN WILLIAMS is a University Distinguished Professor of Folk Studies and Anthropology Emeritus at Western Kentucky University where she taught for more than thirty years. She earned her doctorate in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, and her book, Homeplace, won the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s Abbott Lowell Cummings Award. More recently, she has combined oral history and material culture methodologies in directing the Ravensford Oral History Project, on behalf of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and an oral history and architectural survey of African American resources in Transylvania County, North Carolina. She has served as the editor of the Vernacular Architecture Newsletter and as vice-president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, as well as president of the American Folklore Society. In 2019, the American Folklore Society awarded her the Kenneth S. Goldstein Award for Lifetime Academic Leadership.