English Professor is One of 24 Nationwide to Receive Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship

Cristina Pérez Jiménez, Ph.D., an assistant professor of English at Manhattan College, is one of 24 professors across the United States to be awarded a 2019-2020 Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship, a national fellowship administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on behalf of the Ford Foundation. 

“I am very thankful to the Ford Foundation for helping me advance my research, and for the support of the English department, the School of Liberal Arts, and the Manhattan College administration throughout the application process,” Pérez Jiménez said. “I hope that this award will bring even greater national visibility to the innovative, wide-ranging research being done by faculty across Manhattan College.”   

The fellowship, administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine on behalf of the Ford Foundation, supports outstanding scholars with evidence of superior academic achievement, extraordinary promise of future achievement as scholars and teachers, and a commitment to use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.

Pérez Jiménez will spend her fellowship year in 2019-20, researching and writing her book, Here to Stay: The Making of Latinx New York, which “weaves labor and ethnic history, sociocultural analysis, and literary criticism to show the construction of a distinct New York Latinx cultural imaginary during the embattled decades of the 1930s and ’40s.”

A member of the English department since 2016, Pérez Jiménez received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and teaches courses on Latinx and U.S. multiethnic literatures, as well as Caribbean and postcolonial studies. 

Her teaching, like her research, pays special attention to issues of race, ethnicity, colonialism, migration and diaspora. She incorporates in the classroom many of the ethnic literary archives that are integral to her scholarship. She is also the co-editor of a bilingual scholarly edition of Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s Manhattan Tropics/Trópico en Manhattan (Arte Público Press, 2019).