Adrienne Brown is Professor in the Departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago and the Director of Arts + Public Life, a hub for artistic exploration, expression, and exchange that fosters neighborhood vibrancy on Chicago’s South Side. She is co-editor, with Valerie Smith, of the volume Race and Real Estate (2015) and the author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, winner of the 2018 First Book Prize from the Modernist Studies Association, and The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership, published by Stanford University Press in 2024.