Brandi T. Summers

Associate Professor, African American and African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University

Brandi T. Summers, PhD, is associate professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Dr. Summers is author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019) and has published articles and essays that analyze blackness, culture, aesthetics, and urbanization, in both scholarly and popular publications. Her current book, Oakland Echoes: Reimagining and Reclaiming the Black City, highlights the roots and routes of resistance and reclamation, not only as a response to urban gentrification and related economic policies, but also as a quest to think about the past, present, and future of a Black city.

Photo credit: Clara Perez Medina