The University of Virginia Press is pleased to announce Race, Place, and Justice, a new series that will publish the latest scholarship on architecture, architectural history, planning, preservation, and design. Informed by critical heritage studies, this series will examine and address how aspects of the built environment derive from and perpetuate dissonance, inequity, and subordination, and will highlight individual and community responses to such oppression. The series will be edited by Louis P. Nelson, senior editor, and Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson, consulting editors.

As series senior editor Louis P. Nelson notes, “Race may be one of the least understood forces shaping the built environment, both in our interpretations of past buildings and landscapes and in contemporary practice. As recent years have made clear, this is especially true in the North American context. In launching this series, we wish to curate a space that takes this intersection seriously and supports work from a younger generation of scholars for whom race and the built environment is increasingly important.”

Inspired by recent scholarship surveying the landscape of slavery and subjugation in the Atlantic world, Race, Place, and Justice welcomes projects from new and established scholars and practitioners, ranging from single-authored monographs to multi-authored/contributed volumes to books aimed at crossover audiences.

The inaugural volumes will be published in the spring of 2025. The first, Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstructions, is a groundbreaking collection of essays edited by Nathaniel Robert Walker and Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann that documents how the transatlantic slave trade and slavery shaped the fabric of our buildings and landscapes, and how architecture remains problematically entangled with the ongoing legacies of slavery. The second, The Belgian Friendship Building: From the New York World’s Fair to a Virginia HBCU, coauthored by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Katherine Kuenzli, and Bryan Clark Green, recounts the circuitous story of how a landmark of modernist architecture that seemed to extol European colonization became a part of the campus of Virginia Union University in Richmond in 1940.

To inquire about publishing in the series, please contact Mark Mones, Editor for Architecture, Urban Design, and Regional Books at the University of Virginia Press, at emm4t@virginia.edu.