Brandi T. Summers

Brandi T. Summers, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS) at Columbia University. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. In particular, she 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 Afterlives: How Black Cities Survive Their Unmaking (University of California Press, 2027), traces the systematic destruction and persistent resistance of Black Oakland across seven decades of "urbicide," the intentional killing of Black urban space. Through the concept of the "spectral city," Summers examines how Black Oakland exists simultaneously as a disappearing demographic reality and an omnipresent cultural force, haunting the landscape even as displacement accelerates.

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, and The Funambulist. She is on the editorial boards of SOULS, Urban Geography, City & Community, cultural geographies, and Environment & Planning D. Dr. Summers is also a member of the editorial collective for Antipode.

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.

Selected academic articles, essays, and book chapters

Summers, Brandi T. 2026. “When the Margin is the Center: Urban Geography and Possibility Amid Crisis.” Urban Geography, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2025.2601043.

Summers, Brandi T. 2026. “Oakland and the Ghosts of Urbicide.” Places Journal, March.

Summers, Brandi T. and Moriah Ulinskas. 2025. “Archiving Oakland.” Places Journal, April.

Summers, Brandi T. and Juleon Robinson. 2025. “Black Geographies.” Pp. 159-170. In J. Winders and I. Ashutosh, eds. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Cultural and Social Geography, Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Summers, Brandi T. 2024. “The Reparative Schematics of Housing in Zachary Levenson’s Delivery as Dispossession.” Critical Sociology 51(3): 601-604.

Summers, Brandi and Desiree Fields. 2024. “Speculative Urban Worldmaking: Meeting Financial Violence with a Politics of Collective Care,” Antipode 56(3): 821-840.

Summers, Brandi T. 2023. “Picturing the Textures of a Chocolate City.” Pp. 143-149. In G. Harris and A. Watson, eds. Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City, Delmonico Books/High Museum of Art.

Summers, Brandi. 2022. “Urban Phantasmagorias.” City 26(2-3): 191-198.

Summers, Brandi Thompson and Olalekan Jeyifous. 2022. “Apocryphal Gospel of Oakland: (Im)permanence, Improvisation, and Our Absurdist Future.” Perspecta 54: Yale Journal of Architecture.

Summers, Brandi. 2022. “Black Insurgent Aesthetics and the Public Imaginary,” Urban Geography 43(6): 837-847.

Summers, Brandi T. 2021. “Untimely Futures.” Places Journal, November 9.

Summers, Brandi T. 2021. “Aesthetic Activism and the Quest for Authenticity in a Time of Crisis.” Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 6(3), June 14.

Summers, Brandi Thompson. 2021. “Race, Authenticity, and the Gentrified Aesthetics of Belonging.” Pp. 115-139. In C. Lindner and G. Sandoval, eds. Aesthetics of Gentrification: Seductive Spaces and Exclusive Communities in the Neoliberal City, Amsterdam University Press.

Summers, Brandi Thompson. 2021. “Reclaiming the Chocolate City: Soundscapes of Gentrification and Resistance in Washington, DC,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39(1): 30-46.

Summers, Brandi Thompson and Kathryn Howell. 2019. “Fear and Loathing (of Others): Race, Class, and Contestation of Space in Washington, D.C.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43(6): 1085-1105.

Summers, Brandi. 2017. “Race as Aesthetic: The Politics of Vision, Visibility, and Visuality in Vogue Italia’s ‘A Black Issue.’” QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking 4(3): 81-108.

Summers, Brandi. 2019. “‘Housing is a Natural Right, Not a Privilege’: Anti-Gentrification Activism in a Chocolate City.” The Funambulist 22, March 4:12-14.

Summers, Brandi Thompson. 2019. “Post-Apocalyptic Shine in the Afro-Future.” ASAP/Journal 4(2): 317-320.

Summers, Brandi Thompson. 2019. “‘Haute (Ghetto) Mess’: Post-Racial Aesthetics and the Seduction of Blackness in High Fashion.” Pp. 245-263. In H. Gray, S. Banet-Weiser, and R. Mukherjee, eds. Racism Post-Race: Culture, Critique, and the Color Line. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Summers, Brandi. 2019. “Crafting Selves: Elia Alba’s Supperclub and the Politics of Home(place).” Pp. 40-51. In S. Reisman, G. Bolster, and A. Nanda, eds. The Supper Club: by Elia Alba. Chicago: Hirmer Publishers.