Corey Miles

Dr. Miles research interests are situated at the nexus of Black performativity and carcerality, with a regional focus on the U.S. south. He investigates how surveillance and policing are technologies that fuel the structure of the U.S. south, and the ways Black aesthetics has challenged the epistemological assumptions of this structure. His forthcoming book Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South (University Press of Mississippi) maps the ways the U.S. south itself is a site of carcerality, and how trap music is used as a relational space to contest and make sense of emotional and spatial violence. Dr. Miles explores how racialized emotions, often built into the gritty cadence of trap music, are important analytical sites for understanding the emotional, spatial, and temporal violence of anti-Black structures. In addition to his work on Black performativity, he is interested in Black temporality. His current project builds on the idiom that suggests ‘doing time’ is a carceral experience and asks, “In what ways do Black people resist doing time and/or time itself?”

Selected Publications

Miles, C. J. (2023). Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South (University Press of Mississippi).

Miles, C. J. (2023). “I don’t want to do time, I want to save it”: Carcerality of time and Black temporal resistance. Time & Society. 
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0961463X221148814

Miles, C. J. (2022). Sociology of Vibe: Blackness, Felt Criminality, and Emotional Epistemology. Humanity & Society. 
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/01605976221146733

Miles, C. J. (2022). Listening to the video: Hip Hop videography and Rural Black Aesthetics. Cultural Studies, 1-24. 
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2022.2056218

Miles, C.J. (2020). Rural Feminist Trap: Stylized Gendered Performativity in Trap Music. Journal of Hip-Hop Studies 7(1), 44-70.
https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/jhhs/vol7/iss1/6/