Mabel O. Wilson Takes On Another Big Role at Columbia
She is the new chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies.
Mabel O. Wilson, the Nancy and George Rupp Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, is the new chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS) department. Wilson is one of the leading voices in critical studies of architecture. She has pioneered a way to articulate scholarship, practice, and activism in engaging with architecture’s power and responsibilities. In doing so, her work—from books to monuments to exhibitions—has been enormously influential.
Wilson will now bring her innovative ideas to AAADS. She discusses her vision for the department with Columbia News.
As the new chair, how will you build on your predecessors’ work?
Kellie Jones and, before her, Farah Griffin engaged in the heavy lifting of hiring exciting new faculty whose research represents the path-breaking future of Black Studies at Columbia, which officially started five years ago. This academic year, we have the good fortune to have three new faculty members join AAADS. We are thrilled to welcome Nyle Fort, whose scholarship centers on how spirituality in Black communities builds multiracial freedom movements. Also joining is Rachel Grace Newman, whose research focuses on contemporary and colonial art practices in the Caribbean and African Diaspora.
The final addition to our department is the interdisciplinary scholar of urbanism, race, and aesthetics, Brandi T. Summers, who authored the highly praised Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City. I also worked with Kellie and Farah on crafting our proposal for a new doctoral program in AAADS. We still have a few hurdles to clear, but we hope to welcome our first cohort in two years. Last year, writer Edwidge Danticat joined the department as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities. We look forward to hosting a conversation with Edwidge about her new collection of essays, We’re Alone, which casts a probing and poignant lens on life in the wake of colonial histories.
While chair, will you continue to teach?
I hold a joint appointment between Arts and Sciences, where AAADS is located, and GSAPP. This fall, I am teaching two architecture courses. One is a doctoral colloquium, Property, which examines how the formation of the discourse and discipline of architecture—the European arts of building—depended upon practices of ownership and laws that constituted forms of property like land and buildings, but also the self-possessed modern subject.
The other class is a section of our lecture course for first year Masters of Architecture students—Questions of Architectural Theory 1—which focuses on 19th-century architecture. Through weekly rubrics like Race and Nation, and Nature and Resource, we introduce students to how architectural modernity is a contested, geographically and culturally uncertain category. I always learn a great deal from our in-class dialogues, as we read and debate key works of the period on architecture, urbanism, politics, philosophy, and more.
What sort of programming is planned for this year?
We continue to work closely with the Institute for Research in African American Studies, which inaugurated Black Studies at Columbia more than 30 years ago. On October 4 and 5, we are hosting How to Build a Fire in celebration of the centennial birth of writer, activist, and Harlemite, James Baldwin. This event is organized by IRAAS Director Jafari S. Allen, in collaboration with the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
To celebrate the forthcoming publication of AAADS alumna Zinga Fraser’s Shirley Chisolm in Her Own Words: Speeches and Writings, we are in the midst of planning an event with the Museum of the City of New York. Other events we look forward to this year include our Zora Neale Hurston lecture, which will be given by Mignon Moore, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Sociology at Barnard, and the awarding of the Columbia-Barnard Sankofa Prize, which recognizes an undergraduate student whose work continues the spirit of 1968 by furthering the cause of social justice.
Will you introduce architecture and design into the department's research, classes, and programming?
Typically, Black Studies departments and programs situate their disciplinary emphasis in either the humanities or the social sciences. AAADS has taken a unique interdisciplinarity approach to the field. Thus I am fortunate to have AAADS colleagues and research fellows whose scholarship engages space and the built environment from the intimate to the urban to the planetary. Frank Guridy’s new book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play, explores how Black and Brown Americans use the typology of the stadium as a space to reimagine belonging and action.
Our recent hire, Brandi Summers, is a key thinker in the emerging field of Black Geography. Two years ago, my colleague in Anthropology, Vanessa Agard-Jones, and I curated a series of conversations, Black Counter Cartographies, which brought together diverse scholars, artists, and designers to explore the spatial practices of Black life across the diaspora, and how they construct “counter cartographies” of sociality, imagination, and liberation.
What impact do you want the department to have on Harlem?
As someone who thinks a lot about space and place, I love to remind people that our full institutional name is Columbia University in the City of New York. From my perspective, a more accurate geographical description would be to call us Columbia University in the Mecca of Harlem. With that in mind, AAADS continues its commitment to our local community inaugurated by IRAAS’s founder, Manning Marable. From his deep and learned perspective, Marable argued in a New York Times op-ed that “Black Studies must utilize history and culture as tools by which an oppressed people can transform their lives and the entire society. Scholars have an obligation not just to interpret, but to act.”
On September 11, 2024, our Up/Town Hall: Black Studies 2024 and Beyond at the Schomburg Center in Harlem kicked off the academic year with a vibrant public forum. Our panelists shared stories and received salient questions from students, directors of local organizations, fellow Black Studies program members, and the general public about how to wage and learn from today’s freedom struggles.
What are you working on now?
I’m close to completing a draft manuscript of Building Race and Nation: How Slavery and Dispossession Shaped U.S. Civic Architecture. The new book explores the contrast between the ideals that architecture of the Virginia State House or the U.S. Capitol were built to represent—democracy, freedom, equality—and the realities of their construction by enslaved individuals on lands formerly inhabited by Native American nations. My goal is to publish Building Race and Nation in 2026—the year that marks the 250th anniversary of the United States.
I’m also honored to be invited by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to present excerpts of this research in the A.W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts. I will deliver the four-part lecture series, America’s Architecture of Freedom and Unfreedom, in the National Gallery’s East Building Auditorium every Sunday from March 9 to March 30, 2025. Perhaps our local Columbia alumni will join the conversation.