Scholar
Teacher
Activist

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Ph.D.

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, Black women’s intellectual histories, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. Her first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize and an updated and revised Portuguese translation was just published in September 2022 by the Federal University of Bahia Press. The book includes an analysis of the relationship between environmental justice movements and land and housing rights struggles in Brazil. She published the edited volume Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Perspectives and Research with Melanie Medeiros (Rutgers University Press, 2023). She is currently working on two book projects: Evictions and Convictions: The Right to Home and life in the Americas, a comparative analysis of grassroots movements for the right to housing and life in Jamaica, the United States, and Brazil, and The Fire Inside: The Social Justice Imperative at the Heart of African Diaspora Studies that illustrates the challenges of activist research amidst racial and gender violence.