Anthropologist and historian, he writes about culture and politics in Mexico and Latin America, experiencing different areas from sociological essay to narrative history, from journalism to theatre. He is author of numerous books, such as Las salidas del laberinto: Cultura e ideología en el espacio nacional mexicano (Joaquín Mortiz, 1995); Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), El antisemitismo y la ideología de la Revolución Mexicana (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), and The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014), among many others.
He has teach in different universities in Mexico and the United States, as well European and Latinamerican universities as Guest teacher. He has directed the Center for Latinamerican Studies at Chicago University, the Historical Studies Research Center at New School for Social Research in Nueva York, and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University. Lomnitz also directed the magazine Public culture (2004-2010). Along with his brother Alberto Lomitz, he won the Premio Nacional de Dramaturgia in Mexico (2009), for the play El verdadero Bulnes .
He currently writes twice a month in the newspaper La Jornada and he is full professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, where he is also director of the Mexican Studies Center.