About
Lewis Miles is a sociology Ph.D. candidate who is broadly interested in the ways Black U.S. Americans interface with the global. He links the historical to the contemporary in the study of social movements, culture, and the construction of modern social and political projects such as citizenship, race, and gender. Miles attends to both social fixtures and changing dynamics in Black mobilities and migration to explore how people make sense of their place in the world through their relationships to others and social structures.
A dominant focus in both social science and public policy is migration into the United States. Miles makes a departure from this focus in scholarship to study out-migration from the United States and the rare population of Black U.S. Americans who have emigrated for various reasons. His dissertation narrows in on the contemporary presence of Black people from the United States living in Mexico. Why have these individuals migrated to Mexico? What are their lives like south of the U.S. border and how do they make meaning of their presence in Mexico?
Miles is a pre-doctoral social demography trainee at the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research and is affiliated with the Program for Research on Black Americans and the transdisciplinary RacismLab collective housed by the Social Environment and Health Program. He enjoys traveling, outdoor adventures, cooking with fire, and making mixed media art. A North Carolina native, Miles holds a Masters of Arts in sociology and he is a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of the historic Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
