Demar F. Lewis IV, PhD
Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland
Demar F. Lewis IV is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. Demar is also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of African American and Africana Studies. He is a sociologist and critical criminologist trained in Black Studies and public policy whose research examines how historical and contemporary notions of safety influence the ways that Black people organize their lives. This has led Dr. Lewis to develop multiple research studies to advance understandings of how racial violence, police violence, and resource deprivation influence perceptions of safety in the United States in the past and present. His current projects examine (1) the influence of gentrification and resource deprivation on policing practices and Black Americans’ perceptions of community safety in Cincinnati and across the U.S., (2) the evolution of the “defund” mandate in U.S. politics, (3) the health consequences of carceral violence and racism in the U.S., and (4) the causes and consequences of U.S. lynchings. To pursue his research agenda, Demar uses historical methods, qualitative interviews, statistical analyses, and computational methods. As a doctoral student Demar was a part of the inaugural Spencer Cohort of the Institute for Critical, Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies, the third cohort of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Health Policy Research Scholars Program, and was a 2022 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow.
