James Birchfield, Ph.D

James Birchfield, Ph.D is former Curator of Rare Books at the University of Kentucky. He has served as President of Clay Lancaster’s Warwick Foundation, Chairman of the University of Kentucky Art Museum Advisory Board, and as a member of the boards of the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation and Henry Clay’s Ashland. Birchfield is a former editor of The Kentucky Review, author of Kentucky Countess: Mona Bismarck in Art and Fashion and Clay Lancaster’s Kentucky: Architectural Photographs of a Preservation Pioneer. With wife Martha he is co-author of Aylesford: Some Historical Chapters. He has written on Kentucky artist Thomas S. Noble, cabinetmaker Porter Clay, architect Matthew Kennedy, and private press printer and artist Victor Hammer and has lectured for the Natchez Antiques Forum, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Preservation Nantucket, and the Decorative Arts Trust. In 2014 he received the Blue Grass Trust John Wesley Hunt Lifetime Award for Historic Preservation.