B. Brian Foster

Twitter: @bbrianfoster

Research Interests: Race and Place; Black Racial Attitudes; Economic Development (in the rural U.S. South); Popular Culture

Areas of Methodological Expertise: Qualitative Methods, Ethnography, Oral History, Participatory Mapping

B. Brian Foster is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. His scholarship centers Black community life in the contemporary rural American South, with particular attention to economic development and placemaking. His work advances two commitments: reintegrating the rural South into scholarship on race and culture, and archiving the histories of rural Black communities. He advances these commitments through sustained fieldwork that links ethnography, oral history, archival study, mapping, and visual techniques. Together, these methods form a unified infrastructure for recording, preserving, and interpreting Black community life across scholarly, public, and community settings.

Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork and over 200 on-the-record interviews in rural Mississippi, he has published two books, directed three short films, and founded a digital oral history archive.

He is the author of I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), which received the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Ida B. Wells Book Award from the Association of Black Sociologists. He is also co-author of Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight (Celadon Books, 2024), a collaborative photo-essay project examining how racial histories persist in the American built environment.

Working with filmmaker Ethan Payne, Foster is the creator of the three-part short film anthology We Do a Black South Way (We Travel, We Dance, and We Make), an oral and documentary account of Black community traditions in the rural South. Each of the films has received festival recognition, including a 2024 screening at the Tribeca Film Festival. The trilogy draws on more than sixty oral history interviews recorded as part of The Black Volumes, his ongoing archival initiative documenting culture, history, and community life in the rural South.

Foster is currently completing Casino Town, an ethnographic and archival study of the long-term transformations produced by casino development in Mississippi.

His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Mississippi Humanities Council. He previously served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Programs in Sociology at the University of Virginia, where he advises graduate students and teaches courses on race, place, popular culture, and qualitative methods.

PUBLICATIONS

Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight (Celadon Books) 
I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life. (University of North Carolina Press) 
“‘Everybody Gotta Have a Dream’: Rap-centered Aspirations among Young Black Males Involved in Rap Music Production.” (Issues in Race and Ethnicity: An Interdisciplinary Global Journal) 
“Rewriting Wright: A Note on Perspective in Method and Writing.” (The New Black Sociologists: Historical & Contemporary Perspectives) 
"Antebellum Houses of the American South: What Happens Now?" (Veranda Magazine) 
"As Real as the Mississippi Hills" (Bitter Southerner) 
"The Black Woman Who Demanded the Surrender of the University of Mississippi's State Flag" (CNN) 
"Confederate monuments are more than reminders of our racist past. They are symbols of our racist present." (Washington Post)
"We Travel" Award-Winning Short Film (Southern Foodways Alliance)