B. Brian Foster

B. Brian Foster is an ethnographer and multi-medium storyteller working to document and interpret the culture, folklore, and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural U.S. South. For the last ten years, he has set his work in several towns and small communities in north Mississippi, where he was born and raised. Brian’s areas of expertise include the sociology of racism and race, place studies, urban/rural sociology, and qualitative methods.

Brian has written two books. I Don’t like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020) chronicles the growth and development of blues tourism in the Mississippi Delta. The book received awards from the Association of Black Sociologists and the 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 featuring the work of award-winning photographer Richard Frishman. Frishman’s hyperpixel photographs document vestiges of racism, oppression, and segregation in the U.S. (e.g., a set of double doors that once was a “Colored Entrance,” the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL), and Foster’s essays blend memoir and personal storytelling with ethnographic reporting and sociological analysis to offer piercing commentary on the realities and histories captured by the photographs.

Brian is working on a new book—Casino Town—which interrogates the cultural, environmental, and human impacts of casino development in the Mississippi Delta. He is also creating a multimedia archive—“The Black Time Capsules”—focused on Black culture and placemaking in the rural South. At UVA, Brian is a member of the “Home Places: Mapping Black Virginia” working group, which received funding from the Karsh Institute to pilot a public history program focused on the history and culture of Black communities in central Virginia.

Since 2021, Brian has served as co-editor-in-chief of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, an official journal of the American Sociological Association and the top peer review outlet for sociological scholarship on racism and race.

Brian is also an essayist and filmmaker. His writing has appeared in edited volumes, as well as national, regional, and local outlets, including Delish, Veranda, and Bitter Southerner; and his short films have been selected and awarded by more than a dozen film festivals.