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 an ethnographer, archivist, and multi-medium storyteller (e.g., documentary, ethnographic writing, non-fiction) working to document and interpret the culture, folklore, and placemaking traditions of Black communities in the rural U.S. South. He has authored two books, written and directed three short films, and directed three oral history collections.

Brian’s scholarship and archival work have been supported by the National Science Foundation, Mississippi Humanities Council, and grants and fellowships at the University of Mississippi (where he was an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Southern Studies) and UVA. He has also received awards for teaching and advising, including Mississippi Humanities Council “Teacher of the Year” in 2021.

Brian’s first book, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020), examines the rise of blues tourism in the Mississippi Delta since the 1980s. Building on Clyde Woods’s work on economic development and Black knowledge systems (the “blues epistemology”), the book explores local responses to this evolving approach to community development, revealing many Black residents are uninterested in local blues scenes, viewing them as unappealing and exploitative. It received “best book” awards from the Association of Black Sociologists and Society for the Study of Social Problems.

His second book, Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight (2024), is a collaborative photo-essay collection with Guggenheim-awarded photographer Richard Frishman. Through Frishman’s hyperpixel photography (of landscapes and structures shaped by segregation, Civil Rights struggles, Black migration, and racial violence) and Foster’s essays (blending memoir and ethnographic reporting), the book contextualizes, retells, and interprets histories and contemporary realities of racial violence, exclusion, and placemaking.

Since 2021, Brian has served as co-editor-in-chief of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. At UVA, Brian teaches courses on popular culture, Black community life, and qualitative methods. In 2024, he was awarded a prestigious Shannon Fellowship.

Brian is currently working on two major undertakings. The first is a digital humanities project that features a multimedia archive—including oral history interviews, documentary footage, photographs, and archival items—as well as classroom-centered activities focused on documenting community life in the rural American South. The second is his third book, Casino Town, which explores casino development in Mississippi.

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)