Dr. Rolando Herts
Director, The Delta Center for Culture and Learning
Executive Director, Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area
Dr. Herts is the director of The Delta Center for Culture and Learning and executive director of the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area at Delta State University. He is a university-community engagement scholar who is committed to stimulating diverse, equitable, and inclusive cultural heritage development with regional, national, and international collaborators.
Dr. Herts’ university-community partnership development expertise has strengthened collaborations with the National Park Service, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Alliance, Mississippi Delta Blues Festival Brazil, and various museums, arts organizations, and tourism bureaus throughout the Mississippi Delta. An alum of the Smithsonian NMAAHC’s Ethical Interpretation Workshop, he serves on the Alliance of National Heritage Areas governing board where he led authorship of the organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion position paper “Racial Equity, Community Empowerment, and Social Cohesion: Sociocultural Impacts of National Heritage Areas.”
Dr. Herts holds a Ph.D. in planning and public policy from Rutgers University, an M.A. in Social Science from The University of Chicago, and a B.A. in English from Morehouse College. As an Executive Academy Fellow with the Delta Regional Authority’s Delta Leadership Institute, he was awarded an executive education certificate in authentic leadership from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.