José O. Pérez is a Ph.D. candidate majoring in International Relations and Comparative Politics, with research interests in migration and refugee policies, critical security studies, global health politics, and political violence. His regional focus is on Latin America, in particular, Brazil.

Pérez’s dissertation examines the Brazilian government’s response to Venezuelan migrant and refugee influxes since 2017. Specifically, it analyzes the creation of Operation Welcome (“Operação Acolhida”), in partnership with numerous international and civil society actors, to resettle these individuals, the impact of Venezuelan migration on municipal bureaucracies, and their experiences of vulnerability in local labor markets, via a lens of intersectionality. His fieldwork in Brazil during 2023 included five field sites across the country, where he collected semi-structured interviews and participant observations, and was funded by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship. Pérez was also selected as a 2021 Diversity Fellow by the American Political Science Association and awarded a graduate student research grant by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.  

Pérez holds an M.A. in International Strategic Studies from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS, 2019) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He also holds a B.A. in Political Science and Latin American Studies from the University of Florida (UF, 2014), and was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellow in Brazil (2015, 16). His research publications include articles in Security Studies, Security Dialogue, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Latin American Perspectives.