Daniel Vivian is a historian with who has been involved with historic preservation throughout his career. He earned his Ph.D. in history at the Johns Hopkins University and is the author of A New Plantation World: Sporting Plantations in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Before pursuing an academic career, he served as a historian with the National Register of Historic Places program of the National Park Service in Washington, DC; as coordinator of the statewide historic properties survey program of the South Carolina State Historic Preservation Office; and as a research associate at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training in Natchitoches, Louisiana. From 2010-2017 he taught in the Department of History at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Vivian has prepared several successful nominations to the National Register of Historic Places, has coauthored a National Historic Landmark nomination, and consults frequently on preservation projects throughout the Ohio Valley. His writings have appeared in Winterthur Portfolio, The Public Historian, Ohio Valley History, and the South Carolina Historical Magazine.

Dr. Vivian’s current research concentrates on historical memory of slavery in the era between the world wars. During the 2018-19 academic year, he served as co-principal investigator (with Julie Riesenweber) for “Sustainability Guidelines for Historic Campus Buildings,” a project funded by a 2018 University of Kentucky Sustainability Challenge Grant.

Recent Publications

A New Plantation World: The Sporting Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900-1940.New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

“Investigating Kentucky’s LBGTQ Heritage: Subaltern Stories from the Bluegrass State.” Co-authored with Catherine Fosl. The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (May 2019): 218-244.

“Charting the Course: Challenges in Public History Education, Guidance for Developing Strong Public History Programs.” Coauthored with Robert Weyeneth. The Public Historian 38, no. 3 (Aug. 2016): 25-49.

“Contesting Neoliberalism: The Value of Preservation in a Globalizing Age,” in Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States, ed. Max Page and Marla Miller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016): 250-53.

“Does Historiography Matter for the National Register?” In Tamara Gaskell, ed., Preserving Places: Reflections on the National Historic Preservation Act at Fifty from The Public Historian (Indianapolis: National Council on Public History, 2016): 35-37.

Julia Brock and Daniel Vivian, eds. Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of a New South: The Sporting Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and Red Hills Regions, 1900-1940. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.