The U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield issues alerts when the preservation of cultural heritage anywhere in the world is threatened by armed conflict or natural disaster.
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USCBS is a charitable, not-for-profit, non-governmental organization committed to the protection of cultural property worldwide during armed conflict.
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USCBS has a unique role in protecting the cultural heritage from looting or destruction in areas of the world where armed conflict is occurring.
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Historically, protection of cultural property during armed conflict was not practiced. But, in 1863, the first laws were enacted. Many more policies, laws and treaties to protect cultural heritage have been adopted worldwide since then.
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USCBS has gathered a wealth of diverse reference materials in regard to the history of the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict.
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U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield
Nancy C. Wilkie, President
Nancy Wilkie is the William H. Laird Professor of Classics, Anthropology and the Liberal Arts, Emerita at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. A founding member, she served as Secretary of the USCBS from 2006-2013 and currently serves on the Cultural Property Advisory Committee—a group of experts and members of the general public who advise the President of the United States on requests from foreign governments for import restrictions on their archaeological and ethnological artifacts in accordance with the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act.
Since beginning her archaeological career in 1968, Dr. Wilkie has worked on archaeological projects in Greece, Egypt, and Nepal and served as President of the Archaeological Institute of America from 1998 to 2002. A graduate of Stanford University, she received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
Richard B. Jackson, Vice President
Colonel (Retired) Richard B. "Dick" Jackson is the Special Assistant to the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General for Law of War Matters. He has served in that position since 2005, when he retired from the U.S. Army after over 30 years in uniform. He served in Infantry, Special Forces, Joint and Coalition commands during his military career, spending most of the last ten years as the principal legal advisor at a U.S. Army Division, Multinational Division North in Bosnia, the Army Special Operations Command, U.S. Army Pacific, and Joint Forces Command – Naples, a NATO Headquarters. He served in military operations in Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq.
He was also the Chair of the International and Operational Law Department of the Army Judge Advocate General's School, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has written extensively in professional publications and lectured around the world on law of war matters. In 2010 he was elected to be the Chair of the Lieber Society Interest Group of the American Society of International Law, which is a private organization promoting dissemination and discussion between practitioners and academics on the law of armed conflict.
Patty Gerstenblith, Secretary
Patty Gerstenblith is Distinguished Research Professor of Law at DePaul University College of Law and Director of its Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law. She is the immediate past Co-Chair of the American Bar Association Section on International Law's Art and Cultural Heritage Law Committee. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Cultural Property from 1995 to 2002 and served as chair of the President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee.
The third edition of her book, Art, Cultural Heritage and the Law, was published in 2012. She received her J.D. from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Fine Art and Anthropology. She served as a clerk to the Honorable Richard D. Cudahy of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 1983-84. A founding member of USCBS, she was elected Secretary in 2014.
Perry McGowan, Treasurer
Perry McGowan is a Certified Public Accountant with CliftonLarsonAllen LLP, one of the nation's largest public accounting firms. He practices with the firm's Construction and Real Estate services group in Minneapolis, Minnesota working as a professional advisor focused on the tax planning issues of real estate owners, designers and builders. He has earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in business and law with several universities in Minnesota, where he is licensed as a CPA and Attorney.
He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the American Bar Association, and related state and local professional associations. Perry has served as an adjunct professor in financial responsibility at the University of Minnesota Graduate School and in volunteer service with other cultural and environmental charitable organizations.
Eryl P. Wentworth, At Large
Serving as the executive director of the American Institute of Conservation for Historic & Artistic Works (AIC) and the Foundation (FAIC) since 2004, Eryl Wentworth is responsible for coordinating institutional advancement and developing strategies to better serve and promote the field of conservation. In her role, she advocates for the protection of cultural property and oversees cultural emergency programs, including a specially trained volunteer team, the National Heritage Responders, and the Alliance for Response program, in addition to a professional development program for conservators and programs and resources for the variety of professionals responsible for the care of collections.
With a master’s degree in anthropology and museum training and a background in objects conservation, Eryl has over twenty years of museum experience. Between 1995 and 2001, she served as the director of the Octagon, the museum of the American Architectural Foundation devoted to the presentation and interpretation of architecture and design. Prior to coming to Washington, Eryl was the head of conservation and registration at the Colorado Historical Society in Denver and then spent ten years as the assistant director and director of exhibitions and special projects at the Valentine, an urban history museum in Richmond, Virginia.
Nancy E. Kraft, At Large
Nancy Kraft is a preservation librarian and the Head of the Preservation and Conservation Department, University of Iowa Libraries. She is part of the American Institute for Conservation-Collections Emergency Responders Team (AIC-CERT). Nancy received the Midwest Archives Conference 2009 Presidents' work for her extraordinary work following the historic levels of flooding that struck Iowa in the summer of 2008. In 2006 she received the University of Iowa president's Award for State Outreach and Public Engagement for her many interrelated contributions to the preservation and accessibility of historical sources in Iowa.
She is a lecturer and preservation consultant for the OceanTeachers Academy, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, UNESCO, in Ostend, Belgium. (The OceanTeachers Academy is an international center that provides training for ocean data managers and marine librarians all over the world.) Kraft is active in the American Library Association serving as Chair of the Preservation and Reformatting Section of the Library Collections & Technical Services Division, 2005-2006, and currently the ALA Voting Representative to the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). She received her M.A. from the University of Iowa.
Jacob Nadal, At Large
Jacob Nadal is the Executive Director of ReCAP: The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium, a partnership among Columbia University, The New York Public Library, Princeton University, and Harvard University. ReCAP is the largest repository of its kind in North America, with over 13.5 million items stored in a highly optimized preservation environment. Mr. Nadal has led preservation programs at Indiana University, NYPL, and UCLA, and served as Director of Library and Archives for the Brooklyn Historical Society. In 2005 and 2013, he traveled to Liberia to lead preservation efforts for Liberian government records and cultural heritage collections, culminating in the recovery and exhibition of Liberia's original Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Mr. Nadal serves as an adviser to a number of cooperative library and archives preservation efforts in the United States, including HathiTrust, OCLC Shared Print, as well as to the National Digital Stewardship Residency program and the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Outreach and Education initiative. Mr. Nadal received his BA from University of Puget Sound and his MLS from Indiana University, and he serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute.
James K. Reap, At Large
James K. Reap is an attorney who specializes in historic preservation issues. An Associate Professor in the Master of Historic Preservation Program at the University of Georgia (USA), he has also served as chair of the preservation commissions in the City of Decatur and DeKalb County and as vice chair in Athens, Georgia. He is a founding member of both the Georgia Alliance and National Alliance of Preservation Commissions as well as current President of the Athens Historical Society and a past President of the Athens-Clarke Heritage Foundation. Reap is currently a board member of the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation and a past board member of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation and Preservation Action. He has provided training and technical assistance to preservation commissions throughout the United States.
Professor Reap is also a Fellow of the Dean Rusk Center, International, Comparative and Graduate Legal Studies and an affiliated faculty member of the University of Georgia African Studies Institute. A past President and current Secretary General of the Committee on Legal, Administrative and Financial Issues of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and a Fellow of US/ICOMOS, he is serving as a Coordinator of the ICOMOS Scientific Council, an organization of all ICOMOS international scientific committees. He has worked on preservation issues in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Laurie Rush, At Large
Dr. Laurie Rush is an Anthropologist and Archaeologist who has served as a US Army civilian for fourteen years managing Cultural Resources at Fort Drum, NY. She has a BA from Indiana University Bloomington, an MA and PhD from Northwestern University, and is a Fellow of the National Science Foundation and of the American Academy in Rome. Under her leadership, the Fort Drum cultural resources program has won numerous Army and Department of Defense Awards. Dr. Rush was the military liaison for return of the Mesopotamian City of Ur to the Iraqi People in the spring of 2009. She also represented US Central Command at an Environmental Shura in Kabul, Afghanistan in February of 2010 and analyzed cultural property protection lessons learned from the Iraq and Afghan conflicts for the Central Command Environmental Program in 2010.
Dr. Rush lectures widely in the US and overseas to both military and civilian audiences on the importance of identification of and respect for cultural property on the battlefield. Educational materials developed by her team in partnership with Colorado State University have reached over 125,000 US military personnel and are also being used by UNESCO, the Associated National Committees of the Blue Shield, and the Austrian Defence Academy. Dr. Rush has been recognized by her peers with the Register of Professional Archaeologists Special Achievement Award, the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation Chairman's Award for Federal Achievement in Historic Preservation, and the Booth Family Rome Prize for Historic Preservation.
Timur Tusiray, At Large
Timur Tusiray is an attorney at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP. He is a part of the firm's litigation group in New York, where his practice has primarily focused on complex commercial litigation in both plaintiff- and defense-side actions in federal and state courts. Prior to joining Kramer Levin, he was an Orfalea-Brittingham Fellow and assistant general counsel at the Clinton Foundation. Before his career in law, he was a curator at Istanbul Museum of Modern Art.
He has externed at the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime where he helped develop strategies to combat the international illicit market in cultural heritage, and has remotely clerked for the Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. He is currently a member of the New York City Bar Association Art Law Committee, as well as several related organizations and nonprofits, and continues to write and speak in the field of cultural heritage and law. He received his B.A. from U.C.L.A., and J.D. from the University of Southern California, Gould School of Law..
President
Nancy C. Wilkie »
Vice President
Richard B. Jackson »
Secretary
Patty Gerstenblith »
Treasurer
Perry McGowan »
Eryl P. Wentworth »
Nancy E. Kraft »
Jacob Nadal »
James K. Reap »
Laurie Rush »
Timur Tusiray »
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Directors at Large
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