Delia Duong Ba Wendel (she/her) is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and International Development at M.I.T. Her research engages three main areas: forms of community repair after conflict and disaster; African urbanism; and spatial politics. Her interdisciplinary work draws together Urban Studies and Planning, Critical Peace Studies, Architectural History, Cultural Geography, and Anthropology.

Current research builds from over a decade working in Rwanda and informs two book manuscripts. Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage (Duke University Press, 2025) is an intimate history of memory justice representation that traces relationships to nascent human rights practice in the Global South. A second project, Peace Villages, explores post-genocide peacebuilding as a socio-spatial endeavor; one that is defined and challenged in the design of homes, settlements, and civic space. This research has been recognized by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, Harvard Center for Ethics, and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Delia is also co-editor with Fallon Samuels Aidoo of Spatializing Politics (2015) and curator of the M.I.T. CAST and Mellon Foundation funded exhibition, Memory Atlas for Repair (2024-26).

Delia received a PhD in Urban Planning from Harvard University. She also holds degrees in Architecture (BArch, Rice University), Cultural Geography (MSc, University College London) and Architectural History and Theory (MDes, Harvard GSD). In 2017-18 she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Wolf Humanities Center. Delia previously taught in UPenn's African Studies department, the Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning departments at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and was an Assistant Professor in Architectural Studies at University of Edinburgh.

At M.I.T. DUSP, Delia directs the Planning for Peace research collective. She is also the managing editor of Projections, DUSP's annual peer-reviewed journal on critical topics in urban studies and planning. 

Contact: wendel at mit dot edu