Louis Nelson

Education:

PhD Art History, University of Delaware

BA, William and Mary 

Biography:

Louis P. Nelson is Professor of Architectural History and the Vice Provost for Academic Outreach. He is a specialist in the built environments of the early modern Atlantic world, with published work on the American South, the Caribbean, West Africa, and the United Kingdom. 

Nelson is an accomplished scholar, with nine books to his name. These include three book-length monographs published by UNC and Yale University Presses, six edited collections of essays, two terms as senior co-editor of Buildings and Landscapes--the leading English language venue for scholarship on vernacular architecture--and more than 50 articles, essays, and book reviews. He is also a celebrated teacher, having won a university-wide teaching award in 2007 and serving as the 2008 UVA nominee for a state-wide Outstanding Faculty Award. Nelson's teaching and research focuses on the close examination of evidence-both material and textual-as a means of interrogating the ways architecture shapes the human experience. His monograph, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (Yale, 2016) won three major book awards and was very positively reviewed in twelve different venues from popular—Times Literary Supplement—to scholarly—William and Mary Quarterly, Art Bulletin, and Architectural History, among others. 

But he has also become a leading advocate for place-based reparative public history. At UVA and in Charlottesville, this work has taken the form of scholarship that contextualizes the four monuments installed at the height of Jim Crow segregation, walking tours and on-line videos that seek to disseminate a broader understand of how racism is inscribed in the local landscape, a university renaming commission, partnership on a new website for and a narrative interpretation of the new Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, and co-editing both a digital series on UVA and the History of Race and Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University. He was also the lead author and co-PI on Race, Place and Equity, a $5M Andrew Mellon Foundation funded grant. He has recently been named the senior editor of Race, Place, and Justice, a book series at UVA Press. 

Selected Publications:

Thomas Jefferson’s University: Architecture and Education in the Early Republic (Yale, 2027)

Reparative Histories: Local Democracy and the power of Place in the American Landscape, edited with Angel Parham with Shaheen Alikhan and Katie Wu (UVA, 2027)

Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University, edited with Maurie McInnis (UVA, 2019)

Charlottesville 2017: the Legacy of Race and Inequity, edited with Claudrena Harold (UVA, 2018)

Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (Yale, 2016)

Falmouth, Jamaica: Architecture as History (University of the West Indies Press, 2014)

Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early America, edited with Maurie McInnis (UVA, 2011)

The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (UNC, 2009)