The Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law would like to reintroduce Dr. Stephen Perz as our newly appointed department chair. Previously, Dr. Perz severed as the department’s associate chair under Dr. Barbara Zsembik, who served as department chair from 2015-2022. The department would like to thank Dr. Zsembik for her years of dedicated service.
Dr. Perz received his PhD in sociology with a specialization in demography from the University of Texas at Austin in 1997. He began his career at UF in 1997 as a post-doctoral fellow in Latin American Studies and has since transitioned to Professor of Sociology as well as being affiliate faculty of UF’s Center for Latin American Studies and UF’s School of Natural Resources and Environment. He has conducted research in the Amazon on migration into frontier regions, socio-economic drivers of land use and land cover change, socio-spatial processes of road building, the social-ecological impacts of infrastructure, and the political ecology of environmental governance.
In addition to serving as a member of nearly 80 graduate committees, Dr. Perz has chaired over 30 PhD dissertation and MA thesis students in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the School of Natural Resources and Environment. In 2014, he was named a UF Foundation Preeminence Term Professor. In 2015, he was selected the UF International Educator of the Year for Senior Faculty. From 2016 to 2019, he was named a UF Term Professor. He won a CLAS Teacher of the Year Award in 2018-2019.