Education: B.A., The College of William and Mary; M.A., Ph.D., University of Delaware

Background: Mr. Nelson, who specializes in Early American architecture, joined the faculty of the Department of Architectural History in the Fall of 2001. He teaches undergraduate classes in architectural history and Early American architecture, a graduate seminar in Early Southern Architecture, and a graduate-level Field Methods in Traditional Architecture. His dissertation, "The Material Word: Anglican Visual Culture in Colonial South Carolina," (Delaware, 2000) emphasizes the ways churches express regional identity, social politics, and divergent theologies of the sacred. His dissertation research included fieldwork in England and Jamaica, the latter resulting in some of the first systematic recording of eighteenth-century architecture in the Caribbean. He is in the process of publishing portions of his dissertation and related subjects. "Anglican Church-Building and Local Context in Early Jamaica," will appear in volume X of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. He has also been working on select buildings from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginia and plans to publish his research on those buildings in the coming years. Mr. Nelson has a secondary interest in sacred space in theory and practice and recently published an article on the subject, "Building Confessions: Architecture and Meaning in Nineteenth-Century Places of Worship" in Virginia Raguin (ed.) Sacred Spaces: Building and Remembering Site of Worship in the Nineteenth-Century (Holy Cross, 2002). He has developed a graduate seminar entitled "Sacred Space" which fosters inter-disciplinary research in architecture, religious studies, and anthropology among other disciplines. Mr. Nelson will be the visiting scholar for the 2002 Graduate Summer Institute sponsored jointly by the University of North Carolina and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts.