Brandi T. Summers, Ph. D.

Brandi T. Summers, Ph.D. is Visiting Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, where she is the Director of Graduate Studies. Her research engages theoretical themes that cut across multiple domains of social life. She builds on epistemological and methodological insights from cultural and urban geography, urban sociology, Black studies, and media studies by examining the cultural, political, and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered.
Dr. Summers’ first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map blackness in Washington, D.C. In it, she demonstrates the way that competing notions of blackness structure efforts to raise capital and develop land in the gentrifying city. Her second book, Oakland Echoes: Reimagining and Reclaiming the Black City (under contract with the University of California Press), explores and highlights the roots and routes of this 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.
While an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Summers was the Principal Investigator of the Mellon Foundation-supported Archive of Urban Futures (2022) in collaboration with the Oakland, California-based housing justice organization, Moms 4 Housing. The Archive isa multimodal database of material, including documents, images, recordings, and maps that documents Oakland’s history and how it has changed over time, as well as efforts to foster emplacement and produce new worlds and urban futures. She also briefly served as Interim Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) at UC Berkeley.
Dr. Summers is a Contributing Writer for Places Journal,and has published several articles and essays that analyze the relationship between race, power, aesthetics, and urbanization that appear in both academic and popular publications, including New York Times, The Boston Globe, Urban Geography, and The Funambulist. She is on the editorial boards of SOULS, Urban Geography, City & Community, cultural geographies, Environment & Planning F, and AAG Review of Books.Dr. Summers is also a member of the editorial collective for Antipode. Her work is cited and she is regularly quoted in national and international media outlets. She has appeared on several television, radio, and podcast episodes, including Aljazeera, the Kojo Nnamdi Show, Hear to Slay, and the New Books Network.
Born and raised in Oakland, California, Dr. Summers received her BA in History from the University of Pennsylvania, her MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and earned an MA and a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.