About Me

Dr. Patricia Posey is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where she is a faculty affiliate of the Race and Capitalism Project and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. Recently, she was awarded a visiting faculty fellowship from Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA).

She is a mixed methodologist whose research broadly examines the relationship between race and American political economy, focusing on links between capitalism, urban space, and political behavior. She proudly leads the Political Economy of Race Lab (PEARL) which represents represents an effort to build a research community around the study of political economy and race.

She is developing a book manuscript (out for review) that examines the political and financial inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities in the US. She focuses on how financial services such as pawnshops, check-cashing outlets, auto title loans, and payday loans (collectively known as the fringe economy) exacerbate extractive relationships across race and class in a racialized political economy. The manuscript is based on her dissertation project, which was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Urban and Local Politics’ Byran Jackson Dissertation Research on Minority Politics Award and supported by the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences’ Teece Fellowship.

She was awarded a Russell Sage Foundation Gates Foundation Pipeline Grant to support work about race, class, and COVID-19; and the Susan Clarke Young Scholar award from the American Political Science Association’s Urban and Local Politics section. She has work forthcoming or published in academic outlets, such as Polity, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and Journal of Research on Adolescence, and public outlets, such as the Politics of Color and The Washington Post. Her research has won more than 35 grants, prizes, or fellowships, including from the Ford Foundation, American Political Science Association, and the Russell Sage Foundation.

Prior to joining the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, Dr. Patricia Posey was a Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at the University of Chicago, a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been recognized as a Fontaine Fellow, Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, American Political Science Association Ralph Bunche Scholar, and American Political Science Association Minority Fellow.

Dr. Posey received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 and a double BA in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Florida in 2013.