Ph.D. Candidate at Congressional Conference

Photo with First Lady Michelle Obama at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Public Policy Conference. Judith Perez (front row, third from right) is one of the Graduate Housing Fellows at the Institute for the 2010-2011 academic year.

Perez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Fordham University, where she also obtained advanced certification in Latin American and Latino Studies. Her dissertation is a qualitative analysis on the residential outcomes and housing options of middle-class Caribbean Latino, non-Hispanic Black and ethnic White native New Yorkers. In her research, she examines racial and ethnic differences in the road to becoming middle class, exploring issues pertaining to residential mobility, segregation, discrimination, gentrification and homeownership.

Perez recently completed an Alumni Dissertation Writing Fellowship at Fordham and will soon defend her dissertation. She received additional fellowships that supported her research on housing and residence from Howard University's Summer Institute for Race and Wealth in Washington, D.C., funded by the Ford Foundation, and a dissertation fellowship provided by The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College-City University of New York. Other fellowships include her selection as a summer fellow for the Smithsonian Latino's Center's Museum Studies Program in Washington, D.C.

Publications related to housing include encyclopedia entries: "Segregation and Latino/as," "Residential
Segregation," and "Barrio" in two scholarly volumes: Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society (Russell Sage) and Latinos/as and Criminal Justice: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press). Perez also published an article in the Fall 2006 volume of The Bronx County Historical Society Journal, entitled: "Movin' on Up": Pioneer African-American Families Living in an Integrated Neighborhood in the Bronx, New York."

She is currently working on a chapter centering on migration and community/cultural formation in The Bronx for an edited volume, tentatively titled: Blacks and Puerto Ricans in the Bronx: Hidden Histories of Culture, Community and Politics in New York's Northern Borough, edited by Brian Purnell, Ph.D., Bowdoin College.

Perez has served as an assistant faculty member for the National Equity Center's Summer Civil Rights and Social Justice Training Institute, held at UCLA. She also taught as an adjunct lecturer in the Latino and Latin American Studies department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice-CUNY and Fordham University's College of Liberal Studies, teaching courses in both sociology and Latino/Ethnic Studies.

She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Studies from Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y., and her Master of Arts degree in College Student Personnel Administration from Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York. Perez says she is a proud native New Yorker, born and raised in The Bronx, New York.