Featured Speakers

Tony Hiss
Clement Alexander Price
Terry Davis
Julie C. Hart

Tony Hiss, an independent author, lecturer, and consultant on restoring America’s cities and landscapes, is the author of thirteen books, most recently IN MOTION: THE EXPERIENCE OF TRAVEL (Knopf, October 2010—hardcover and e-book; the 2012 paperback edition, from APA Planners Press, features a new foreword by Robert D. Yaro, president of Regional Plan Association).

Hiss was a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than 30 years, and for the past 18 years has been a Visiting Scholar at New York University, first at the Taub Urban Research Center and more recently at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He has been a Regents Lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley and in Davis, a Scholar-in-Residence at the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University, and a Senior Fellow of the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems (CIUS).

Previous books by Hiss include the award-winning THE EXPERIENCE OF PLACE (now a Vintage paperback and e-book), and H2O: HIGHLANDS TO OCEAN (with Christopher Meier), which introduces an almost unknown treasure, the vast natural landscape and waterscape that still supports the entire New York City region, the most densely settled part of North America.

IN MOTION, Hiss’s most wide-ranging book, explores the kinds of awareness that travel of all kinds, even around a walk around the block, makes available, with particular emphasis on an extraordinay “ hidden dimension,” the wide-awake, fully alert sense he calls Deep Travel. The book champions this ability, which because it sees patterns invisible to other parts of the mind, can be of increasing value to designers and planners during a time of rapid change. Like THE EXPERIENCE OF PLACE, which reached a broad general audience and at the same time has been embraced by architects, landscape architects, planners, preservationists, and educators, IN MOTION is a book for anyone who’d like to make Deep Travel more a part of daily life and for professionals in many areas eager to extend their range. His new Campaign for the New Jersey Meadowlands is a part of this.

Hiss has written widely in earlier books about travel, the value of special landscapes and regions, and, on occasion, about his family. Among these books are ALL ABOARD WITH E.M. FRIMBO (with Rogers E. M. Whitaker), an American travel classic hailed as the ultimate railroad book; two books about the Midwest with celebrated landscape photographers— PRAIRIE PASSAGE (with Edward Ranney); and DISARMING THE PRAIRIE (with Terry Evans); A REGION AT RISK: THE THIRD REGIONAL PLAN FOR THE NEW YORK-NEW JERSEY-CONNECTICUT METROPOLITAN AREA (with Robert D. Yaro), which received front-page coverage in The New York Times; and THE VIEW FROM ALGER’S WINDOW: A SON’S MEMOIR (a New York Times Notable Book, and now a Vintage paperback and e-book).

Hiss wrote the report that launched New York State’s 100-mile-long Hudson River Valley Greenway and led to the Hudson Valley National Heritage Area. He consults frequently on changing 21st-century regional growth patterns and how they relate to “larger heres and longer nows.” He has lectured widely in the U.S., Canada and Japan, and conducts Deep Travel mobile workshops, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, and Travel & Leisure. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and has received a number of awards, including the National Recreation and Park Association’s National Literary Award, which recognized Hiss’s lifetime of “spellbinding and poignant” writing about “how our environments, modes of travel, and other aspects of the American landscape affect our lives.” "His words," said the citation, "are often poetic, always real."

Tony Hiss lives in New York City with his wife, the novelist Lois Metzger, and their son, Jacob. His website is www.howwetravel.org

Clement Alexander Price is Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History, Rutgers University-Newark Campus, and Director of the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, an interdisciplinary academic center. Dr. Price is the foremost authority on the black New Jersey past by virtue of his Freedom Not Far Distant: A Documentary History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey (1980), Many Voices, Many Opportunities: Cultural Pluralism and American Arts Policy (1994) and numerous other scholarly works. He has been the recipient of many awards for academic and community service. In 2006, he was inducted into the Rutgers University Hall of Distinguished Alumni.

Dr. Price is a trustee of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, chairman of the Save Ellis Island Foundation, a member of the Scholarly Advisory Committee to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, and a Trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He chaired the New Jersey State Council on the Arts from 1980 to 1983. In July 2011 Dr. Price was appointed by President Obama to serve as vice chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.

Along with the late Giles R. Wright, he is the 1981 co-founder and co-organizer of the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious conferences in observance of Black History Month in New Jersey. He is co-editor with Lonnie Bunch and Spencer Crew of the book, “Slave Culture: A Documentary Collection of the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writer’s Project, 1936-1938,” to be published by Greenwood Press in 2013.

Terry Davis has been with AASLH since 1994. Her responsibilities include the day-to-day management of operations at AASLH, including staffing and staff management, budget, fundraising, program planning and implementation, membership services, and acting as an advocate for history institutions and professionals. She represents AASLH on a number of national boards; presents at numerous state, regional, and national meetings; served as a faculty member of the Seminar for Historical Administration; and has served as visiting faculty for program such as the Cooperstown Graduate Program and the nonprofit track at David Lipscomb University in Nashville. In addition, Davis has published articles for such journals as The Public Historian and History News, and written introductions for several book titles. During her tenure at AASLH, the organization has experienced financial and programmatic growth. In 2003, AASLH completed its first ever endowment campaign and raised over $1million for an operating endowment. Immediately following the campaign AASLH established a planned giving Legacy Society. Since that date AASLH has raised another $500,000 for its endowment. Also during Davis’ tenure AASLH developed and delivered new programming such as the American Indian Museums Program, Pathways: Finding Yourself in History, Visitors Count visitor survey program, StEPs standards program for historical organization, Connecting to Collections Bookshelf partnership with IMLS, and the Federal-State Partnership for Museums Initiative. Davis acted as Coalition Administrator for the Federal State Partnership for Museums Coalition, a network of over 60 museum service organizations dedicated to securing federal grants (through IMLS) that will go to the states restricted for regranting to museums to meet state and local needs. Also, in 2010 AASLH received a performance award from the Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence. Davis received both her BSBA and MBA degrees from Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana. She has also completed courses in fundraising and planned giving at the Indiana University School of Philanthropy, and in 1993 received her CFRE (Certified Fundraising Executive) credentials from the National Society for Fundraising Executives. Ms. Davis lives in Nashville, Tennessee. She is Chair of the Board for the Institute for Learning Innovation, the past president for her county Habitat for Humanity affiliate; past chair of Humanities Tennessee; a past trustee of National History Day; was a member of the Public Participation Committee for the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and is a member of Fairfield Baptist Church.

Julie C. Hart has been engaged in AAM’s standards and excellence efforts since 1996. She served as the Accreditation Program’s Assistant Coordinator and Coordinator before becoming Assistant Director of Accreditation in 2001. In 2008 she became AAM’s Senior Director for Museum Standards and Excellence, taking over the leadership of an expanded portfolio including the Accreditation, Museum Assessment, and Peer Review Programs, museum standards and ethics issues, and many internationally focused activities. Most recently, this has expanded to include leading new initiatives associated with the transformation of the Association to the Alliance, including the “Reinvention of Accreditation,” the Continuum of Excellence, Pledge of Excellence, and the Core Documents Verification Program. She is also facilitating the transition of the excellence programs from a 100% paper-based environment to a fully online participation system. Through her years working with AAM standards programs she has had unprecedented access to the detailed operational practices and documents of several hundreds of museums, of all types and sizes, gaining a wide perspective on the trends, issues, and current standards and best practices in the museum and non-profit world. Ms. Hart has developed and delivered numerous presentations and workshops on accreditation and standards at national, regional, state, and international venues—including Italy, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and China; taught AAM’s two-day professional education seminar Secrets of Accreditation; written for various museum association publications on accreditation; and is a member of the U.S. Army Certification Team Report Review Panel. She was also a member of the Association for State and Local History’s StEPs Advisory Committee (a standards program for history museums and historic sites), and is a Peer Reviewer for Maryland Nonprofits’ Standards for Excellence certification program. Prior to joining AAM, she pursued her interest in American art and museum work through curatorial and collections management training at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and her college galleries. She holds an M.A. (1996) in Art History from The George Washington University in Washington, DC, and a B.A. (1992) in Art History from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.