Falmouth, Jamaica Architecture as History

Louis P. Nelson is the Associate Dean for Research and International Programs in the School of Architecture, University of Virginia, USA where he teaches courses in American architecture specializing in colonial and early national architecture, vernacular architecture, and theories and practices of sacred space. The majority of his work focuses on the early American South, the Greater Caribbean, and the Atlantic rim. Nelson is interested in the close examination of evidence-both material and textual-as a means of interrogating the ways architecture shapes the human experience. His commitment to field-based object analysis situates him in the scholarly tradition within American architectural history broadly understood as the study of vernacular architecture.

Edward Chappell is the Shirley and Richard Roberts Director of Architectural and Archaeological Research at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, USA. He is responsible for excavation, architectural scholarship, restoration, historic preservation, and the quality of new architectural design at this, the largest open-air history museum in the US. Chappell has degrees in history from the College of William and Mary and architectural history from the University of Virginia. He has done extensive architectural fieldwork in Bermuda, Jamaica, and the Carolinas as well as the Chesapeake region. He worked as an archaeologist for the Commonwealth of Virginia and as an architectural historian for Kentucky before coming to Colonial Williamsburg in 1980.

Brian Lage Cofrancesco is a Program Coordinator at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. He has undertaken architectural study and preservation work across the northeast and Caribbean, and his independent research focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth century architecture of New England and the mid-Atlantic. He holds a Bachelors of Architectural History with minors in architecture and historic preservation from the University of Virginia and is a graduate of the Falmouth Field School in Historic Preservation.

Emilie Johnson is an architectural historian who studies the landscapes and built environments of pre-Emancipation plantations in the American South and British Caribbean. Her work focuses in particular on the architectural sources of buildings, questions of access and circulation through spaces, and multiple meanings in the ways that people occupied plantation structures and environments. She received her PhD in Art and Architectural History from the University of Virginia, and currently works as Assistant Curator at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the plantation home of America’s third president and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.