Global Houses of the Efik

Louis P. Nelson, Professor of Architectural History at the University of Virginia, is a specialist in the built environments of the early modern Atlantic world, with published work on the American South, the Caribbean and West Africa, and is a leading advocate for the reconstruction of place-based public history. Louis is an accomplished scholar, with two book-length monographs published by University of North Carolina Press and Yale University Press, three edited collections of essays, two terms as senior co-editor of Buildings and Landscapes – the leading English language venue for scholarship on vernacular architecture – and numerous other articles. His work focuses on the early American South, the Greater Caribbean and the Atlantic rim. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (Yale, 2016) won three major book awards and was very positively reviewed in twelve different venues ranging from the popular Times Literary Supplement to the scholarly William and Mary Quarterly, Art Bulletin and Architectural History, many calling it a tour de force.

Shaheen Alikhan’s dissertation work, continuing from her MA thesis in architectural history on the construction of eighteenth-century slaving vessels, focuses on the reshaping and creation of waterfront spaces to facilitate the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. These liminal spaces, essential but unique within the larger landscape of chattel slavery, represented concentrated areas in which enslaved and legally free Africans and members of the African diaspora took opportunities to learn, communicate, earn wages and build relationships and they have been largely overlooked. As an architectural historian, Shaheen has contributed to anthologies pertaining to the Caribbean world and reparative justice, and worked as a digital documentation specialist. She is currently in discussion with a publisher about her book Building a Floating Prison: Slave Ships Throughout the Long Eighteenth Century.