Louis Nelson

Vice Provost for Academic Outreach

Louis P. Nelson, Vice Provost for Academic Outreach, is the primary advocate and representative for community engagement, public service, and academic outreach programs across the university. In his role as Vice Provost, Nelson serves as the chief advisor to the executive vice president and provost on all academic matters relating to community engagement and public service and he oversees numerous related academic units at the University including the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, the Virginia Humanities, the Center for Liberal Arts, and the Virginia College Advising Corps. Nelson is also a Professor of Architectural History and a specialist in the built environments of the early modern Atlantic world, with published work on the American South, the Caribbean, and West Africa. His current research engages the spaces of enslavement in West Africa and in the Americas, where he is working to document and interpret the buildings and landscapes that shaped the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He has a second collaborative project working to understand the University of Virginia as a landscape of slavery.