Research Areas

Political Economies
Racial Geographies

Interests

Black Geographies, Economic geography, Caribbean Thought, decoloniality, reparations and repair, poverty and inequality, race (blackness), the Caribbean (Jamaica), African-American communities (Tulsa, OK)

Contact Information

597 McCone Hall
jovan@berkeley.edu

Office Hours

By appointment (arranged via email)

Links

Personal Website

Biography

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

Education

Ph.D., London School of Economics

Courses

GEOG 155, Race, Space & Inequality

Topics

Faculty topic page
Political Economies topic page
Racial Geographies topic page