Daniel J. Sherman is Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and Professor of History at UWM. He joined the faculty in fall 2001 and took up residence at the Center in the fall of 2002. Professor Sherman came to UWM from Rice University, where he was Professor of French Studies and History.

A historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, Professor Sherman received his B.A. from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Yale. In addition to many articles, he is the author of two books: Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Harvard Univ. Press, 1989) and The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999, paperback edition 2001), for which he received three national awards: the J. Russell Major Prize, given annually by the American Historical Association for the best book in French history published in English, the Laurence Wylie Prize, awarded biennially by the Association for French Cultural Studies for the best book in that field, and an Association of American Publishers Award as one of the best scholarly books published in 1999. He is also coeditor of Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994), widely cited as one of the most influential texts in the emerging field of critical museum studies.

Since receiving his Ph.D. in 1985, Professor Sherman has received research awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Association, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the National Humanities Center (Research Triangle Park), the Fulbright Senior Scholars Program, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Professor Sherman's current research, ranging from ethnography to tourism to interior decorating, concerns French constructions of a primitive or savage "other" in the period 1945 to 1975. In this and other projects, such as a recent special issue of the journal French Historical Studies devoted to visual culture, for which he served as co-guest editor, he advocates and attempts to practice a cultural history as sensitive to the formal qualities of its objects as to the larger historical context of their production and reception. His research and teaching interests also include contemporary museum practice, public art, and the representation of the past in a variety of settings and media.

Center for 21st Century Studies

Daniel J. Sherman, Director