People- and human-centered heritage expert
/ Jeremy C. Wells, Ph.D. bio
In addition to being a musician, I am an award-winning historic preservation/built heritage conservation scholar, teacher, author, consultant, and the sole expert (worldwide) on the psychological effects of the older (e.g., “historic”) built environment on people. Formerly a tenured professor at the University of Maryland, since 2022, my consultancy has focused on solutions for historic preservation/built heritage conservation education, improving public historic preservation policies, and informing preservation practice with a people- and human-centric focus.
I am an expert in US-based and international historic preservation/built heritage conservation theory, practice, and public policy; social science applications as applied to built heritage; community-based preservation/conservation and urban planning; and higher education teaching and administration.
My latest book, Managing the Magic of Old Places: Crafting Public Policies for People-Centered Historic Preservation, was released by the University of Tennessee Press in October 2025.
I am the first and only scholar who has:
Informed historic preservation practice and public policy through environmental psychology;
Categorized U.S.-based historic preservation practice based on a content analysis of employers’ needs and job descriptions, including statistics on the percentage of work in each of these practice areas;
Analyzed the scholarly productivity of tenure-track historic preservation professors, in the United States, including a statistical breakdown of topical areas of these scholars’ publications;
Published a guide for how to become a professional historic preservationist (geared toward prospective students);
Published a comprehensive analysis of public preservation policy in the United States (in my book, Managing the Magic of Old Places).
And, along with my co-editor, Barry Stiefel, we are the only people (scholars or otherwise) who have published a book on post-secondary historic preservation education: Preservation Education: Sharing Best Practices and Finding Common Ground (University Press of New England).
During the past three decades, I have focused my research and teaching on the intersection of heritage, psychology, and social justice, driven by a fundamental belief that the conservation of the older built environment should be about people, not just old buildings. Or, more precisely, I am interested in how old buildings can help people and not the other way around. My journey in this field began with a realization that traditional preservation/conservation practices often felt detached from the lived experiences of the communities they claimed to serve. I transitioned from a practitioner’s role to academia to challenge the status quo, focusing my research on the human dimensions of heritage. I wanted to understand why certain places resonate emotionally with people and how the conservation of the older built environment—especially through public policy—can move beyond a rigid, expert-driven obsession with architectural integrity and historical facts toward a more inclusive, community-centered approach.
My C.V. is available (PDF) here.
—Jeremy C. Wells, Ph.D., Washington, DC (US)
