Erin Lilli

Erin Lilli

Student of the PhD program in Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York

Erin is a PhD candidate in the Environmental Psychology program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and holds a Master of Architecture and a Master of Science in Architecture with an emphasis on Sustainable Design from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is currently finishing the dissertation proposal and preparing to collect data. Her research will examine race, everyday resistance to neoliberalism, and the struggle for housing through a historical-materialist framework by using residential oral histories and archival data in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  This work, in part, seeks to understand what the ubiquitous term gentrification means for Crown Heights and contextualize this process as part of an ongoing and overtly racist mode of production.

In addition to doctoral research, Erin teaches in the Urban Studies department at Queens College having taught courses on Poverty & Affluence and Urban Diversity. Additionally, she holds a Graduate Research Fellowship working with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s Center for the Future of Places reviewing academic literature in geography and anthropology for the Public Space Database Project. Erin is associated with CUNY’s Center for Human Environments as a Research Associate for the Public Space Research Group and previously worked as a research assistant on an NSF-funded project with the Housing Environments Research Group studying the impacts of Community Land Trusts on disrupting systemic inequalities.

Research interests include: political economy and Marxian frameworks, race and neoliberal policies, black radical resistance, housing financialization and debt leveraging, neighborhood change and gentrification, affordable housing, public space, relational social politics, place identity, place attachment, and dwelling.

Dissertation Committee: Dr. Setha Low (chair), Dr. Dana-Ain Davis, and Dr. Cindi Katz

Affiliations: Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network (BAN); QC Adjuncts Unite!

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