CONGRATULATIONS TO CHAMP’S ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, PAUL KAPP, WHO HAS WON A GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP!
(April 12, 2024) Paul specializes in historic preservation,. He is the author of “Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South” (2022) and “The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the Antebellum South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi” (2015), and the co-editor of “SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City” (2012). He is a 2005 Charles E. Peterson Fellow; a 2014 and a 2023 Fulbright Scholar; a 2017 James Marston Fitch Midcareer Fellow; a 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow; and a 2020 Franklin Fellow, U.S. Department of State. He is a past chair of the National Council for Preservation Education and the recent editor of its journal, Preservation Education and Research. He has been an advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation, and he served on the National Register of Historic Places review panels in Illinois and Virginia. Paul will use his Guggenheim Fellowship for his latest book project: “Popular Iconoclasm in the Public Square” will examine how iconoclasm, as both acts of protest and works of civic artistic engagement, can alter the ways that we perceive, appreciate and engage with our most historic and monumental public spaces.
JUST PUBLISHED: Congratulations to Jamie L. Jones on her book
October 19, 2023
Read the announcement and discussion here. 
September 20, 2023
The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks are now inscribed on the World Heritage List.
FALL 2023 SEMESTER: CHAMP WELCOMES KATHRYN HOLLIDAY, PROFESSOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, AS ITS NEWEST MEMBER
https://landarch.illinois.edu/people/profiles/kathryn-e-holliday/
June 12, 2023 (from The New York Times)
March 31, 2023
FALL 2022
ICOMOS-USA (United States National Commission for the International Council on Monuments and Sites) has adopted World Heritage USA as its public name. 
“Hot off the press!” Paul H. Kapp‘s new book is here.
CHAMP Director, Dr. Helaine Silverman, has been named a Trustee of World Heritage USA-US/ICOMOS and member of the Executive Board.
CHAMP Associate Director, Paul H. Kapp, received a Fulbright for Spring 2023 during which time he will be in Paris working on a new book about controversial monuments.
Dr. Chris Fennell (Anthropology) and Dr. George Calfas (Anthropology affiliate & CERL) have an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City!
AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART IN NEW YORK CITY: “Hear Me Now: The Black Pottery of Old Edgefield, South Carolina”. FEATURING THE WORK OF ANTHROPOLOGY PROFESSOR CHRIS FENNELL AND DEPARTMENT AFFILIATE DR. GEORGE CALFAS 
SPRING 2022
University of Illinois becomes an official partner 
NOVEMBER 15, 2021
The New York Times reports:
APRIL 27, 2021
SEPTEMBER 22, 2020
JULY 13, 2020
MAY 18, 2019: INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM DAY (see ICOM/International Council of Museum and AAM/American Alliance of Museums for more information)
SPRING 2020: CHAMP contextualizes the Covid=19 virus with a historical perspective from EYAM, “the plague village.”
Eyam is a pretty little village of stone cottages in the Peak District of England’s Derbyshire Dales. Eyam has long attracted visitors in a kind of “dark tourism” focused on the villagers’ extraordinary sacrifices to contain the outbreak of plague in 1665-1666.
Although the residents of Eyam didn’t understand the plague, they knew that it was highly communicable. Eyam’s church rector, William Momppesom, took it upon himself to convince the panicked villagers to stay put in order to save the communities around them. Over fourteen months the villagers of Eyam self-quarantined. Nobody entered and nobody left Eyam. By so doing countless lives were saved.
But Eyam paid a terrible price. Day after day mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters died. Some families were totally lost.
The plague passed.
The moral lesson of Eyam should give us hope that if a society decides to act decisively for the larger public good through selfless decency, cooperation, tolerance for inconvenience and—in our case—acceptance of scientific facts, then we will get past this infectious episode and hopefully emerge a better people, even a better nation.
READ MORE: https://las.illinois.edu/news/2020-05-07/pandemics-and-fear-how-history-helps-us-understand-covid-19
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August 23, 2019: This is UNESCO’s International Day of Remembrance for the Slave Trade. This day is stimulating international discussions of reparatory justice and how to make reparations and what these may consist of. Reparatory justice is a controversial concept and one well deserving of its many conversations and ideas.
March 11, 2019: New congratulations to Jenny Davis (Anthropology). Her book, Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance (University of Iowa Press, 2018) has won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies. Jenny is a Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Scholar.
January 10, 2019: CHAMP has won a Presidential Initiative for the Celebration of Arts and Humanities Award for its project called THE MYTHIC MISSISSIPPI. This two-year grant will fund faculty and student research toward the deployment of downstate Illinois’ cultural heritage resources for social and economic development around the creation of themed tourism trails.
January 2019: Congratulations to Jenny Davis (Anthropology) who has been appointed as the Chancellor’s Fellow of Indigenous Research and Ethics. During this two-year fellowship, Jenny will be working on various campus initiatives to ensure that the University is knowledgeable of, and in compliance with, U.S. and tribal government policies and protocols. She will use the Fellowship to collaborate with faculty, campus and tribal leaders, and advise the Chancellor on issues involving the University and ethical research on Indigenous peoples, histories, and cultures. This follows the important
“Land Acknowledgment Statement”, published by the Office the Chancellor
on July 26, 2019.
United Nations declaration: 
SPRING 2018: THREE OF CHAMP’S CORE FACULTY HAVE WON THE PRESTIGIOUS NEH FELLOWSHIP FOR THEIR BOOK PROJECTS:
Donna Buchanan (Music): “Bells in the Music and Culture of Bulgaria”
Paul Kapp (Architecture): “Heritage and the Great Depression: How Historic Preservation Created the Old South”
Dede Ruggles (Landscape Architecture): “Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al Durr”
NOVEMBER IS NATIVE AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH.
OCTOBER 12, 2017
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION:
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP ANNOUNCED TODAY
THE WITHDRAWAL OF THE UNITED STATES FROM UNESCO.
CONGRATULATIONS TO CHAMP COLLEAGUE CLARA CHU.
Clara has been elected to represent the American Library Association on the
U.S. National Commission for UNESCO.
CONGRATULATIONS TO CHAMP COLLEAGUE CELE OTNES.
Cele has been name the Anthony Petullo Professor of Business Administration.
Chris Fennell (Anthropology) has recently published the following (and see his
new book on the BOOKS page):
– “The Stoneware Pottery Communities and Heritage of Edgefield, South Carolina,” thematic collection of nine articles, edited by Christopher C. Fennell, Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage Vol.6, Nos. 2 and 3 (2017).
– “Challenging Theories of Racism, Diaspora, and Agency in African America,” thematic issue edited by William A. White III and Christopher C. Fennell, Historical Archaeology 51(1): 1-148 (2017).
-“Manufacturing Relationships in Industry, Craft, and Heritage,” introduction chapter in “Perspectives from Historical Archaeology: Investigations of Craft and Industrial Enterprise,” textbook compiled and edited by Christopher Fennell, pp. 9-30, Society for Historical Archaeology, Germantown, MD (2016)
– “Innovation, Industry, and African-American Heritage in Edgefield, South Carolina,” article in “The Stoneware Pottery Communities and Heritage of Edgefield, South Carolina,” thematic issue edited by C. Fennell, Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 6(2): 55-77 (2017).
– “Architecture and Landscape Art” (with Shawn Fields and Rebecca Schumann), in Routledge History of the American South, edited by Maggi M. Morehouse, chap. 12, pp. 164-176, Routledge, New York (2017).
– “Reflections on Dynamic African American Cultures and Communities in the Upper Mid-Atlantic, 1610s to 1950s,” chapter in Archaeologies of African American Life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic, peer reviewed book edited by Michael J. Gall and Richard F. Veit, pp. 185-197, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa (2017).