October 2009 Lecture Series Speaker Biographies

M. Kent Brinkley (October 6)

M. Kent Brinkley, a Certified Landscape Architect and Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, is an award-winning landscape architect and author whose professional career spans over thirty years. A native Virginian, he graduated from Kempsville High School in Virginia Beach and attended Mary Baldwin College’s Adult Degree Program in Richmond, where he pursued a B.A. degree in History with a minor in Historic Preservation. He then studied landscape architecture at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology in England. In 1989, he completed the Attingham Summer School on the British Country House in England, where he visited and studied over thirty five country house gardens.

For 18 years, until 2003, Mr. Brinkley served as Landscape Architect for the 303-acre Colonial Williamsburg outdoor living history museum, where his duties included site planning, landscape design, historic landscape research, and staff/volunteer interpreter training. In 1989, Colonial Williamsburg's Shields Tavern project won a Virginia ASLA Chapter, Honor Award for Brinkley’s site/landscape designs. In 2004 he became the Landscape Architect for Basnight Land and Lawn, Inc.

Kent Brinkley has been an occasional and visiting lecturer for the Landscape Architecture degree programs at the University of Virginia, George Washington University and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as well as for Monticello’s annual, Summer Landscape Institute program. He is the author of “The Green Spring Plantation Greenhouse/Orangery and the Probable Evolution of the Domestic Area Landscape,” a research report commissioned by the Colonial National Historical Park in 2003, and “Interpreting Colonial Revival Gardens in Changing Times,” published in Breaking Ground: Examining the Vision and Practice of Historic Landscape Restoration, by Old Salem in 1999. Mr. Brinkley co-authored the best-selling book, The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg, with Gordon W. Chappell.

Martha W. McCartney (October 13)

Award-winning research historian Martha W. McCartney has researched and excavated a wide variety of archaeological sites in Virginia, initially while employed at the Virginia Research Center for Archaeology, and for the past twenty years as an independent scholar. In addition to conducting archival research and reviewing historic literature and maps, Ms McCartney is well-known for developing historic contexts. She has received five awards for her work in historic preservation. A graduate of The College of William and Mary, she has published numerous scholarly and popular books and reports, including The History of Green Spring Plantation (1998), The Free Black Community at Centerville (2000), and Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 1607-1635, A Biographical Dictionary (2007).

Warren M. Billings (October 20)

Warren M. Billings, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of New Orleans, is a frequent speaker on colonial Virginia. He is the author or editor of numerous reviews, articles, book chapters, and books, including A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century (2004), Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (2004), and The Papers of Sir William Berkeley 1605-1677 (2007). He is chairman of the APVA/Preservation Virginia Jamestown Rediscovery Advisory Board, a member of APVA/Preservation Virginia’s Board of Trustees, a member of the federal Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission, and Historian of the Supreme Court of Louisiana. In 2002, he held the Visiting Williams Professorship in the T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond.

A past fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a Virginia Historical Society Mellon Research Fellow, Dr. Billings holds honorary life membership in the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians and the Company of Fellows of the Louisiana Historical Association. In 2003, the LHA presented him with its Garnie W. McGinty Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Virginia Historical Society conferred its Richard Slattern Award for Excellence in Virginia Biography upon him in 2005.

Karen Rehm (October 20)

Karen Rehm is Chief Historian of the Colonial National Historical Park, where she oversees the research, archaeological excavation and preservation of Historic Green Spring. She was a senior member of the National Park Service Planning Team, which developed the proposed General Management Plan for Green Spring in 2003.

Julie Leverenz (October 20)

Julie Leverenz is Co-President of The Friends of the National Park Service for Green Spring. She is Past President of the Historic Route Five Association and The United Way of Greater Williamsburg, and served as Vice Chair of the 2009 James City County Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee.