Brandi T. Summers

Brandi T. Summers, PhD is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. Her first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how competing notions of blackness organize efforts to structure economic relations and develop land in gentrifying Washington DC. Her forthcoming 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 six decades of "Black 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.

Dr. Summers was Principal Investigator of the Mellon Foundation-supported Archive of Urban Futures (2022-2024), in collaboration with the Oakland, California-based housing justice organization, Moms 4 Housing. Alongside Dr. Nathan D.B. Connolly (Johns Hopkins University), Dr. Summers is co-director of the Black Archipelago working group, supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia University. 

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 scholarly and popular publications, including New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Antipode.

Working Group Affiliations

Director of Black Archipelago and the Crisis of Place