Editor's Note: The Feb. 26 talk has been canceled due to an unexpected emergency.

Writer, researcher and historian Mabel O. Wilson will deliver the 2018 Paul R. Jones Lecture, “Notes on a Virginia Statehouse: Architecture and Race in Jefferson’s America,” at 5:30 p.m., Monday, Feb. 26, in room 127 of  Memorial Hall at the University of Delaware.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Wilson is a professor of architecture, co-director of Global Africa Lab and associate director at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Her scholarly research investigates space, politics and cultural memory in black America, and race and modern architecture.

She is the author of “Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture,” a book that traces the implementation of the newly opened and culturally important museum in Washington, D.C. She is also currently writing “Building Race and Nation,” a book about how slavery influenced early American civic architecture.

Wilson was invited to deliver the annual lecture this year because her work focusing on race and architecture is relevant to issues within the field of art history, including discussions about the use of monuments and architecture to reorganize the nation’s dark history surrounding slavery and segregation.

About the Paul Jones Initiative

The Paul R. Jones Initiative fosters educational inquiry, interdisciplinary engagement and critical thinking with and through African American art at the University of Delaware. 

Founded in conjunction with the gift of the Paul R. Jones Collection, housed in Mechanical Hall, the initiative supports a broad range of programming intended to strengthen the collection and its interconnectivity with campus life and community.

The Paul R. Jones Annual Lecture honors the late Mr. Jones and his gift of African American art to the University in 2001. Since its arrival on campus, UD has supported a wide range of research and curricular programming using African American art as the seminal point of departure. This includes American art and culture in dialogue with Africa and its diaspora.

Mr. Jones, who received an honorary doctor of letters degree from UD in 2004, died in 2010.

The 2018 Jones Lecture is sponsored by the Department of Art History, College of Arts and Sciences' Paul R. Jones Initiative and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center.