I am a proud third-generation Black Chicagolander, geographer, and geosonicologist who is also a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology and a Postdoctoral Research Affiliate with Chicago Studies, the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization, and the Urban Theory Lab at the University of Chicago. My research and public humanities work draw from Black geographies, the politics of scale, political economy, (sub)urbanization, and geosonicology to explore how Black people shape the Chicago Metropolitan Area (known colloquially as Chicagoland) and how they are shaped by it. My research is grounded in my love for and commitment to Chicagoland and its people, which courses through my veins like the L trains routing my hometown. Chicagoland is my research and teaching site, but it is also my hometown, which I approach through scholarly rigor, tremendous care, and endless wonder.

As a Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library, I am writing my first monograph. My proposed manuscript is an epistemological critique of the origins of the urban question developed by the Chicago School of Sociology, which challenges how the racialization of space, migration, settlement, and (sub)urbanization are theorized through Chicago as the definitive model of urban-regional space. I trace Black suburban placemaking and the spatial imaginaries of Black people who built suburban settlements across the Chicago Southland—a suburban subregion of Chicagoland—in the post-Reconstruction era. In doing so, I reconstruct the map of Black Chicagoland while redefining the suburbs as a historic Black geography. In my role as a Postdoctoral Research Affiliate with Chicago Studies, I manage a team of undergraduate researchers conducting ethnographic, multi-sited, and interdisciplinary research on Black suburban life across the Chicago Southland for my monograph through my Archiving Black Southland Research Initiative.

My second monograph explores the geographic practices of the Black house music and cultural community of Chicago and how they created house music, house culture, and what I termed “house geographies. Through Black generational storytelling, community cartography, acoustic ecologies, and sensory ethnography, I document how the Black house kids transformed their identities, curated spaces for communal belonging, and developed Black travelways that countered the historical effects of racial discriminatory processes structuring how Black people live in and move through Chicagoland. My husband Roderick E. Jackson, a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, and I are also the artists behind Black Chicagoland Is…— a multi-sensory project that maps Black life across Chicagoland through photography, music, sound, community cartography, and personal narratives.

I hold a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Mount Holyoke College as the first person with a bachelor’s degree in Black Geographies. As the first recipient of the Berkeley Black Geographies Fellowship, I was instrumental in developing Berkeley Black Geographies, a leading hub of Black geographic thought, where I also authored the Black Geographies Library Guide, served as chair of the Black Geosonicologies Research Group, and founded and chaired the Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference.