Steven Nelson is Director of the African Studies Center and Professor of African and African American Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of the award-winning "From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture in and out of African" and is currently completing two books titled, “Structural Adjustment: Mapping, Geography, and the Visual Cultures of Blackness,” and “On The Underground Railroad.”
My areas of expertise are the contemporary and historic arts, architecture and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas, African American art history, and queer studies. I am also well-versed in contemporary art in the West. As my published work shows, my research and writing focus on how art, architecture, and urbanism intersect with society. In addition, from Medieval Swahili architecture to the age of same-sex marriage, Ferguson, and #blacklivesmatter, I have always been invested in writing about art, architecture, and urbanism's connection to the workings of race, sexuality and social status in the US, Europe, and Africa. In a concrete example, my nearly-completed book manuscript "On the Underground Railroad," takes the form of a travelogue to explore the complicated racial terrain of both American Antebellum society and today's political and social landscape.
