Patricia Posey is an Assistant Professor 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. She is a mixed methodologist, specializing in race and American political economy. 

Her current book project examines the effects of different banking and loan institutions on political attitudes and political participation. She is particularly interested in the effects of check cashing institutions, payday loan companies, pawn shops, and the like (collectively known as the fringe economy) on the atittudes of poor, black, and brown communities toward the state. The manuscript is based on her award winning dissertation project which was awarded the Urban Politics Section’s Byran Jackson Dissertation Research on Minority Politics Award and supported by the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences’ Teece Fellowship, and the Department of Political Science.

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 published in academic outlets such as The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and public outlets, such as the Washington Post. More about her research is available here.

Prior to joining the Political Science Department as an Assistant Professor, Patricia Posey was a Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow 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, where she specialized in American Politics. 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.

Patricia Posey recieved 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.