Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor at the GSAPP and a professor in the African American and African Diasporic Studies Department at Columbia University. She serves as the Associate Director at the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-directs the Global Africa Lab. She is a designer/ historian on the architectural team for the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is the author of 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 (University of California Press 2012). She is currently developping the manuscript Building Race and Nation: How Slavery Influenced Antebellum American Civic Architecture and collaborating on a collection of essays on race and modern architecture. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?)- an advocacy project to educate the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor.
