Adrienne Brown is an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago and Faculty Director of Arts + Public Life. With Valerie Smith, she co-edited the 2015 volume Race and Real Estate, an interdisciplinary collection rethinking narratives of property and citizenship. Her 2017 book, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, winner of the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 First Book Prize, recovers the skyscraper’s drastic effects not only on the shape of the city but the racial sensorium of its residents. Her newest book, The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024.

Cosponsored by the Department of African American and African Studies