The Abele Lecture: Hazel Ruth Edwards

The 3rd Annual Abele Lecture in Design & Policy will take the form of an evening fireside conversation with Dr. Hazel Ruth Edwards, Ph.D., FAICP, Assoc. AIA.

Named in honor of Julian F. Abele (BArch 1902), the first Black architect to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, the Abele Lecture explores urgent and evolving conversations in design and policy by centering the perspectives of Black designers and other historically marginalized practitioners.

This year’s lecture focuses on campuses as cultural landscapes, spaces shaped by history, race, and public life. Grounded in her research and teaching at Howard University, where the campus itself reflects a long history of Black architectural and planning leadership, Dr. Edwards examines how campuses are planned, remembered, and sustained, and what they reveal about belonging, power, and possibility within the built environment.

Hazel Ruth Edwards is an award-winning educator, planner, and scholar whose work focuses on uncovering untold spatial histories and elevating Black place-based knowledge within architecture, urban design, and planning. Across her academic and professional career, she has centered spatial narratives and expanded whose histories and voices shape the built environment—contributing to more just and livable places.

Edwards is co-author of The Long Walk: The Placemaking Legacy of Howard University, a landmark study tracing the campus’s 129-year physical development and its role as both a cultural anchor and refuge within racialized landscapes. Originally developed as the historical framework for Howard University’s 1998 Campus Plan, this research has since informed her funded scholarship and publications on placemaking at historically Black colleges and universities nationwide. Her recent fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (2023–2024) extended this work by examining the pre-1867 land development patterns that framed the emergence of Black educational spaces, situating them within longer histories of resistance, refuge, and spatial agency.

A certified planner and Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners (FAICP), Edwards has held leadership roles in academia and campus planning, including serving as Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture at Howard University. In 2021, she was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, where she served for four years as Vice Chair. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture Design Leadership Educator Award, Lambda Alpha International’s Richard T. Ely Distinguished Educator Award, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, College of Fine and Applied Arts Distinguished Legacy Award.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.