Brandi T. Summers

Brandi T. Summers is an associate professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, and a contributing writer at Places.

Her research examines the relationships among and functions of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. She is author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and has published articles and essays that analyze Blackness, culture, aesthetics, and urbanization, in both scholarly and popular publications. Her current research project focuses on questions of history, value, the right to place, and memory and erasure in her hometown, Oakland, California.

Dr. Summers is Principal Investigator for the Mellon Foundation-supported Archive of Urban Futures, in collaboration with the Oakland-based housing justice organization, Moms 4 Housing. The Archive is a multimodal database of material, including documents, images, recordings, and maps documenting Oakland’s history, as well as efforts to foster emplacement and produce new worlds and urban futures.