About Richard M. Candee

Richard M. Candee is professor emeritus of American and New England Studies at Boston University, where he served as director of the Preservation Studies Program, which he helped found, until 2005. In 1983 became the director of the master’s program and its allied JD/MA in preservation and the law. He served as a representative to the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife and to the Committee for a New England Bibliography. He is the author of Atlantic Heights: A World War I Shipbuilder's Community, Building Portsmouth: The Neighborhoods and Architecture of New Hampshire's Oldest City, and numerous articles and essays.

Candee has worked for Old Sturbridge Village, been a trustee and officer of many organizations including president of the Society for Industrial Archeology, the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and the New England Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians. In Portsmouth, NH, he was chairman of the Warner House Association Board of Governors, president of the Portsmouth Athenaeum and is currently the vice president and chair of the exhibits committee for the Portsmouth Historical Society.

A 1997 senior fellowship at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History led to his 1999–2000 traveling exhibition on 19^th century invention and articles in Textile History, The Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for Early New England Folklife, and Historical New Hampshire. He chairs the collections committee at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell and is on the editorial board of the British international journal Textile History.

In 2002 he served as curator for an exhibition at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, The Artful Life of Thomas P. Moses (1808–1881) “Poetry, Music, Painting—Anything But Money” and with friends and colleagues recreated and filmed a memorable “Thomas P. Moses Floral Concert.”

For the past five years he has been exploring the life and work of Russell Cheney working closely with Carol Cheney on the catalog raisonné project. Many of his new findings will appear in an article in Antiques and Fine Arts in spring 2008. He updated the biographical essay by Patricia Heard for the 1996 exhibition Russell Cheney 1881–1945: Artist of the Piscataqua at the Portsmouth Athenaeum and is organizing a second, Russell Cheney— A New England Master in Portsmouth, NH from June to October 2008.