Joelle D.J. Wickens, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Preventive & Community Conservator
Image credit: Evan Krape
Joelle leading a community conservation workshop, January 2025.
jwickens@udel.edu
Welcome! Let me introduce myself. I am a daughter, sibling, wife, parent, educator, mentor, student, facilitator, organizer, preventive conservator, community conservator, engaged scholar…. Others identify me as disabled. I prefer phrases like, uses a wheelchair to navigate when outside of her home.
At the University of Delaware, I am an assistant professor in the Department of Art Conservation. My current work in Sustainable Preventive Conservation is dedicated to evolving the practice of preventive conservation to place social, economic, and environmental sustainability at its core. Equity and Inclusion in Conservation is the other theme on which I focus my energy, passion and commitment. The work in both of these areas has come together in the place where I am investing most of my time these days, the Community Conservation Initiative.
All of this work can only be done in collaboration. I am always on the lookout for partners in any field and/or any community who have an interest in preserving things that have meaning. Please be in touch so we can explain our work to each other and see what comes of it.
Sustainable Preventive Conservation
Explore a selection of publications, presentations, course syllabi, and links to graduate students who are contributing to the work of sustainable preventive conservation.
People, planet, profit venn diagram.
Equity & Inclusion in Conservation
My scholarship is helping to develop an understanding of who holds the power and privilege needed to uphold this status quo in the field, who and what has been excluded from the field, and what it will take to shape the field to include the excluded.
Sally G. Kim inpainting the reconstructed fills to integrate with the original gilding in the Rocaille frame. She is wearing a Cochlear™ Nucleus®7 Sound Processor (dark brown) on her right ear (Image credit: Matthew Hamilton).
Community Conservation Initiative
The Community Conservation Initiative’s mission is to make conservation guidance, techniques and information freely accessible to all individuals, families, neighborhoods, organizations and other communities.
Binh-An Nguyen working with Estelle Reddick to create a protective enclosure for a family treasure. (Image credit: Evan Krape).