Lewis Jasen Miles is a sociologist, artist, and storyteller whose work bridges the worlds of research, culture, and community. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His work has been supported by the Institute for Social Research, the Center for Engagement of Women, and the Social Science Research Council. 

His current project, the first of its kind, Black to Mexico: Migration, Mobility, and the Quest for Freedom, explores Black American migration from the U.S. to Mexico through demographic analysis and deep qualitative inquiry. His work places Black American migration to Mexico in a long history of Black Americans interfacing with the global and crossing boundaries, revealing the complex ways these individuals navigate racial, class, and gender hierarchies in Mexico. His work crosses a range of topics and subfields, including Black political and social movements, particularly emigration and expatriation, international mobility, and diasporic identity.

A secondary area of scholarship for Miles is population health, structural violence, and environmental harm. He draws on historical events and processes to illuminate how land use, state-corporate collusion, and technology produce the negative health outcomes we observe today. In particular, Miles draws parallels between the U.S. south and the 'Global South' showing how racial capitalism, necropolitics, and extractive infrastructures reproduce uneven exposure to toxins, climate risk, and labor precarity. Through cases ranging from petrochemical corridors and ports to platform logistics and tourism zones, he traces the plantation’s afterlives in contemporary infrastructures.

With over a decade of international experience and travel to dozens of countries, Miles’ work is rooted in critical questions of race, mobility, power, and belonging. He moves between interviews and archives, has collaborated across disciplines, and has published in both social science and medical journals.

Miles is multidisciplinary creative who loves narrative-work, history, layers, textures, and dimension in all art forms, especially through music and painting. When he is not crafting critiques, teaching, and writing, you can find Miles DJing hypnotic and funky grooves and layering canvases in gouache or acrylic. Miles is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta and a native of North Carolina.