Resident Faculty, Unit 1
btsummers@berkeley.edu | 510.643.3260
Professor Brandi T. Summers is an assistant professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies. Prior to joining Berkeley in 2019, she was an assistant professor of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Professor Summers’ research and teaching interests focus on race, urban geography, aesthetics, and visual culture. Professor Summers’ book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how aesthetics and race converge to map blackness in Washington, D.C. Her next research project is an interdisciplinary study that examines the complex ways in which uses of space and placemaking practices inform productions of knowledge and power in her hometown, Oakland, California.
Ask me about: gentrification, race/blackness, aesthetics, visual culture, racial and spatial inequality