About
Dr. Corey J. Miles is an Assistant Professor of Sociology & Anthropology at Morgan State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology with a concentration in Africana Studies from Virginia Tech in 2019.
Dr. Miles’s research interests are at the nexus of Black performative culture and the carceral organization of the American landscape. He examines the ways Black performance has served as an epistemological and ontological critique of an anti-Black structure of America that is mediated through carceral logics and technologies.
His current book project is titled Hip-Hop's Vibe: Rural Black Aesthetics and Racialized Emotions in the Carceral South (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming). In this project he uses southern Black hip-hop artists notion of vibe to advance the idea that race is experienced not just objectively, but emotionally. Vibe is used to develop the ‘carceral South’ as a framework to think about the ways Black people in the South and beyond can feel the emotional weight of the criminalization of Blackness. He suggests that carcerality can be detected not only through the logics and technologies that organize geography, but through the ways Black people emotionally register spaces as sites of surveillance, policing, and violence. Black performance, specifically hip-hop, becomes a space to validate the emotions and subjectivity of Black people as they attempt to survive the South.
Dr. Miles has mentored inside juvenile justice facilities, engaged in collaborative community organizing, and worked alongside public school systems to fight anti-Blackness. Dr. Miles has received fellowships from the American Sociological Association, Southern Education Foundation, and Augustana College for his work on Black people and the criminal justice system. These opportunities have provided him the funding to publish work in scholarly journals and edited volume books.
Contact Dr. Miles:
Morgan State University
Behavioral and Social Science Center (BSSC), Rm. 226.3
1700 East Cold Spring Lane, Baltimore MD 2125
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Education
2019
Ph.D. Sociology with concentration in Africana Studies - Virginia Tech 2019
2014
M.S. Sociology – Morgan State University
2012
B.S. Psychology – Western Carolina University
Awards, Scholarships and Grants
Grants
2019 Virginia Tech Institute for Critical Technology and Science Diversity & Inclusion Seed Grant ($20,000) – Co-PI
Fellowships
2019 American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship Program
2019 Diversity Fellowship, Augustana College Diversity Fellows Program
2016 Southern Education Leadership Initiative Fellowship, Southern Education Foundation
Awards
2019 Outstanding Doctoral Student Award, Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech
2019 Social Change Award, Office of Student Inclusion and Diversity, Augustana College
2018 Graduate Achievement Award, The Black Graduate Student Organization, Virginia Tech
2018 MLK Orator Award, Cultural and Community Centers, Virginia Tech 2017 Favorite Faculty Member, Housing & Residence Life, Virginia Tech
2016 Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award, Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech 2014 Graduate Institutional Scholarship, Morgan State University