Brandi Thompson Summers

Brandi Thompson Summers, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of African American Studies and Associate Executive Director of the Institute for Inclusion, Inquiry and Innovation (iCubed) at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work examines identity, memory, place, and history, and how planning and urban design practices are implicated in racial and spatial inequality. Her forthcoming book project, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (University of North Carolina Press, October 2019), explores the way that competing notions of blackness structure efforts to raise capital and develop land in Washington, D.C.