Paul Hardin Kapp

Biography

Paul Hardin Kapp is Associate Professor of Architecture, teaching historic preservation. He is also the Associate Director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he is a Recognized Lecturer at the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage at the University of Birmingham (UK). His courses focus on historic preservation design, preservation theory, and the conservation of historic building materials. His students have placed twice in the Charles E. Peterson Prize for Measured Drawings for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), and they have placed twice in the Students for Classical Architecture Annual Competition. Prior to his tenure at Illinois, he was a Lecturer in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University’s historic architect, from 2002-2008.

He co-edited (with Paul J. Armstrong): SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), which won the Historic Preservation Book Award from the Center for Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington and was recognized as a Choice Best Academic Book Title in 2013. He is the author of The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the Antebellum South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). He recently published his latest book, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Invented the Old South (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2022).  

Professor Kapp has been the chair of the National Council for Preservation Education and is currently the editor of Preservation Education and Research—the Journal of the National Council for Preservation Education. He has served as a reviewer for the UK Fulbright Commission, the Binational Fulbright Commission in Egypt, and for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a member of the advisory boards for the American College of the Building Arts and the Department of Historic Preservation at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Kapp was 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. He continues to serve as a member of the Sustainability Committee for the Association for Preservation Technology (APT).

Professor Kapp is a licensed architect in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee (inactive). His design for the restoration of the I.C. Fowler House in Bristol, Virginia won the 2022 Virginia Hill Historic District Preservation Award from the city of Bristol, Virginia, and the 2022 Gabriela Page Preservation Award, recognizing the year’s most outstanding preservation project in Virginia, by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA-Preservation Virginia).

Professor Kapp is a Charles E. Peterson Fellow (2005); a Fulbright Scholar, University of Birmingham (2014); a James Marston Fitch Midcareer Fellow (2017); an NEH Fellow (2018); and a Franklin Fellow, U.S. Department of State (2020). During the Spring 2023 semester, he will be researching and teaching at La Fondation des Sciences du Patrimonie, Cy Cergy Paris Université (France) as a Fulbright Scholar.