Three experts will speak about the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, focusing on the statue of Robert E. Lee, at a panel discussion at 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 10, in Room 127 of Memorial Hall at the University of Delaware.

The discussion, titled “Race, Memory and Monuments after Charlottesville,” is free and open to the University community.

After the presentations, there will be an opportunity for an open discussion of some of the many issues raised by these events and the speakers’ responses.

The panelists are:

Renee Ater is an associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland and the author of several books and many articles about African-American art and artists, including Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller. Her current book project is Unsettling Memory: Public Monuments to the Slave Past in the United States.

Sarah Beetham, who earned her doctorate at UD, is a lecturer in American art and material culture in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Her current book project, based on her doctoral dissertation on Civil War monuments, is Monumental Crisis: Accident, Vandalism, and the Civil War Citizen Soldier, focusing on the ways in which post-Civil War soldier monuments have served as flashpoints for heated discussion of American life and culture in the 150 years since the end of the war.

Louis Nelson, who also earned his doctoral degree at UD, is a professor of architectural history and the associate provost for academic outreach in the Office of the Provost at the University of Virginia. He is a specialist in the built environments of the early modern Atlantic world, with published work on the American South, the Caribbean and West Africa. His current research engages the spaces of enslavement in West Africa and in the Americas, working to document and interpret the buildings and landscapes that shaped the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He has a second collaborative project working to understand the University of Virginia as a landscape of slavery.

The panel discussion is sponsored by UD’s Department of Art History.