Julie C. La Corte
Assistant Professor Mathematics- Biography
Julie (she/they) grew up in a working-class family in the New York suburbs. Her father delivered mail on the Upper East Side for the Post Office and her mother worked as a secretary at a public school. She was the first in the family to attend college and only the second to finish high school.
Although Julie’s Ph.D. is in math, she studied creative writing and critical theory as an undergrad. After college, she worked as a systems engineer in New York, first for the National Hockey League and then for Cornell University’s Weill Medical College. But she found tech work unrewarding and soon returned to school. She earned her Master’s from Texas State University in 2008 and her terminal degree at the University of Wisconsin’s Milwaukee campus in 2015. Between the M.S. and the Ph.D., she taught at Austin Community College.
Julie began her first tenure-track teaching job in 2015 at Berry College. Also, in 2015, she came out as nonbinary and trans. The college community was supportive and tolerant of gender non-conforming people. But the surrounding off-campus community was not. Facing social isolation as an openly transgender person and fearing for her safety, Julie fled the changing political climate in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District and moved to Atlanta in 2018. She took the first teaching gig she could find, a Limited-Term Instructor position at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College.
Upon arriving at Georgia State, Julie quickly came to love the Perimeter College community. She hopes to serve that community for the rest of her working life. Perimeter College hired Julie for a tenure track position in the college’s Department of Mathematics in 2019.
In 2020, Julie began her research career in earnest, writing her first publication and receiving her first grant (see below). She looks forward to future research in sociology and education. She considers herself less a mathematician interested in social science than a rookie social scientist whose interdisciplinary background includes pure and applied math.
In her teaching, research, and community activism, Julie dedicates herself to the empowerment of historically underprivileged groups. In 2022, Julie organized Dunwoody Sexual And Gender Alliance (SAGA), currently Perimeter College’s only LGBTQIA student club. Her classes are designed to build students’ confidence by engaging them in active cooperative learning. She teaches using free or reduced-cost textbooks whenever possible. In her free time, she works for various organizations in Metro Atlanta, including serving as a member of ATLDSA’s Political Education Committee.
Motto: “Community college is where the community is.”
- Publications
“Theories of Social Reproduction.” Presentation (Atlanta, GA), July 13, 2022.
“Classifying D/s Practitioners without Prior Assumptions: An Application of Cluster Analysis to Social Data.” Article (J. Homosex.), Feb. 15, 2022.
“Calculus I Workbook and Mathematica Applets.” Presentation (online), Oct. 22, 2021.