Research Expertise and Interest

Jamaica and the USA; constructions and infrastructures of poverty, inequality, race (blackness), economy, and the market

Research Description

Jovan Scott Lewis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is generally concerned with the questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair in the Caribbean and US. He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica and Violent Utopia, forthcoming this Fall, which traces the consequences of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. In 2021, he was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to serve on the state's Reparations Taskforce.

Jovan founded the Berkeley Black Geographies Project in 2016, which you can read more about at: theblackgeographic.com