Assistant Professor

Curriculum Vitae

Christina Walker is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs. She specializes in comparative politics and methodology, with a research agenda focused on how digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) shape political information, public trust, and democratic accountability. She examines both how these technologies affect political behavior and develops new computational and experimental methods to study these effects. On the substantive side, she examines elite strategic communication and information in digital environments, and how citizens process and respond to political content online.

Her research has been published in journals such as Political Science Research and Methods, The Communication Review, PS: Political Science & Politics, The AAAI Conference Proceedings, and Politics and the Life Sciences.

She received her Ph.D. In Political Science from Purdue University in 2026, a M.A. at Purdue University in 2023, and a B.A. in International Relations and French Language & Literature at Oakland University. Previously, she worked in the Michigan State Senate and with USAID and the State Department.

Education +

  • Ph.D., Political Science, Purdue University
  • M.A., Political Science, Purdue University
  • B.A., International Relations and French Language & Literature, Oakland University

Areas of Expertise +

  • Comparative Politics
  • Political Behavior
  • Experiments
  • Computational Social Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Political Communication

Honors, Awards, and Achievements +

  • AI Incidents & Best Practices Paper Award, Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Learning (2024)
  • Teaching Academy Graduate Teaching Award (Purdue University Center for Instructional Excellence, 2026)
  • Independent Instructor of the Year Award (Purdue University Political Science Department, 2026)
  • Best Graduate Student Methodological Paper Award (The Methodology Center at Purdue, 2026) (\$500)

Selected Publications +

  • Walker, Christina P. and Joan C. Timoneda. 2025. “Is ChatGPT Conservative or Liberal? A Novel Approach to Assess Ideological Stances and Biases in Generative LLMs.” Political Science Research and Methods.
  • Zulli, Diana, Diana Deyoe, Christina Walker, and Meaghan McKasy. 2024. “Is it Funny or a Trend?: Examining US News Humor on TikTok.” The Communication Review: 1-17.
  • Walker, Christina P., Daniel S. Schiff, and Kaylyn Jackson Schiff. 2024. “Merging AI Incidents Research with Political Misinformation Research: Introducing the Political Deepfakes Incidents Database.” Thirty-Eighth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

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