Title: "Staging Citizenship: W.E.B. DuBois in the World Fairs" Mabel O. Wilson, Associate Professor in Architecture at Columbia University’s GSAPP, navigates her multidisciplinary practice between the fields of architecture, art, visual cultural analysis, and American studies. Her design research and scholarship investigates place and cultural memory in black America, race and visual culture, and new technologies and the social production of space. She is currently completing Progress and Prospects – Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums a book that studies how race, social uplift, and nationalism shaped black life through the ideological spheres of expositions and museums. Her collaborative design practices (KW: a and Studio 6Ten) have worked on speculative and built projects. Her practice has been a competition finalist for several important cultural institutions including lower Manhattan’s African Burial Ground Memorial and the Smithsonian’s National Museum for African American History and Culture (with Diller Scofidio +Renfro.) She directs the GSAPP’s program for Advanced Architectural Research and the HBCU Design Leadership Project. She received a B.S in Architecture from the University of Virginia, a Master of Architecture from the GSAPP, and a Ph.D in American Studies from NYU.
