Mabel Wilson - Departments of Architecture and of African American and African Diasporic Studies, Columbia University

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today's conversation is with Mabel Wilson, who teaches in the Departments of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Through her transdisciplinary practice Studio&, Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal, and desire. She was a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (2020) at the University of Virginia.  For the Museum of Modern Art, she co-curated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). Wilson has published Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). She is currently developing the manuscript for her third book Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession, and American Civic Architecture.