News - College of Liberal Arts - Purdue University

Professor Girard with BISA Award

Congratulations to Dr. Tyler Girard on receiving the British International Studies Association (BISA) 2026 Early Career Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize. This award recognizes early-career academics who have made significant contributions to students' learning experiences in International Studies within the first five years of their careers.

In the words of the BISA judging panel: "Tyler’s nomination reflects an excellent and wide-ranging contribution to international studies pedagogy. His use of innovative teaching methods such as simulation exercises, and broad contribution across numerous modules is indicative of his contribution. The judging panel were particularly impressed by Tyler’s development of study abroad international partnerships with the University of Glasgow, his work as an advisor on Purdue’s Model UN club and Pi Sigma Alpha, and chair of dissertation committees. His contributions exemplify an outstanding early career pedagogical profile, and the panel were pleased to endorse his nomination for this award."

Professor James McCann

Congratulations to Dr. James McCann on his appointment as Interim Department Head of Political Science! Dr. McCann has been a professor of Political Science at Purdue University since 1991. His areas of expertise include public opinion, political psychology, and survey design and methodology.

He is a founding member and co-director of the Methodology Center at Purdue and has received numerous fellowships, awards, and grants. In 2025, Professor McCann received the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Graduate Teacher Award in recognition of his teaching and scholarly excellence.

Professor Cherie Maestas

Congratulations to Dr. Cherie Maestas on being named Associate Dean for Research, Innovation, and Graduate Education in Purdue's College of Liberal Arts! Dr. Maestas served as Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science from 2019 to 2025, guiding the department through a period of substantial growth.

Her research focuses on political communication, political psychology, risk attitudes, and legislative responsiveness. She has held administrative appointments and served the field in leadership roles for more than 20 years.

Molly Scudder

Tara Grillos

Scudder and Grillos Paper on Deliberation Wins Best Paper Award! The Democratic Innovations Standing Group of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) has awarded the 2025 Best Paper Award to Mary F. (Molly) Scudder and Tara Grillos for their paper, "Cynicism as Contagion, Deliberation as Inoculation?" presented at the ECPR General Conference. The award recognizes the high quality of the research and its strong alignment with the section theme, "Coupling and Connecting Democratic Innovations."

Eddie Yang

Congratulations to Dr. Eddie Yang on Receiving the 2025 Best Dissertation Award! The American Political Science Association's Information Technology and Politics section recognized his dissertation, "Automating Autocracy: Authoritarian Institutions and the Politics of Artificial Intelligence." Yang's research highlights how authoritarian regimes, by silencing citizens and suppressing information, inadvertently weaken the very datasets their AI systems rely on.

At Purdue, Yang brings together computational tools and political science to tackle some of the most pressing questions about democracy, technology, and authoritarian resilience. His work underscores both the promise and the pitfalls of applying artificial intelligence to political life.

Lisa Argyle

Purdue Political Science Welcomes Professor Lisa Argyle The Department of Political Science is delighted to announce that Lisa Argyle has joined Purdue as Associate Professor of Political Science.

Argyle's research sits at the intersection of computational social science and political behavior. She is particularly interested in how people talk about politics, in everyday settings and online, and how advanced models and experiments can deepen our understanding of persuasion, polarization, and political participation. She has focused much of her work on exploring how large language models (LLMs) can advance social science inference and democratic practice.

Tara Grillos

Tara Grillos Honored by APSA Dr. Tara Grillos, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University, has received the 2025 Emerging Scholar Award from the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) section of the American Political Science Association. The honor was presented at the STEP section business meeting during the 2025 APSA Annual Meeting in Vancouver. It recognizes researchers within ten years of their Ph.D. whose work makes notable contributions to the field.

Grillos’s research centers on “the human dimensions of sustainable development policy,” focusing on comparative participatory institutions and how local governance arrangements affect environmental behavior, collective action, equity, and well-being in developing contexts.

Mazie Bernard

Spotlight Scholar Mazie Bernard Purdue Political Science graduate student Mazie Bernard was selected by APSA's Interpretive Methodologies and Methods (IMM) group as an IMM Spotlight Scholar for the 2025–2026 academic year. The program highlights three outstanding early-career scholars annually whose work showcases or advances interpretive approaches to the study of politics. Each Spotlight Scholar is paired with a senior interpretivist scholar for mentorship.

Ms. Bernard's dissertation, Ideas and Expertise in Global Economic Governance: Gendered Knowledge Creation, Integration, and Contestation, looks at how new economic ideas are created, integrated, and changed in global economic governance.

Professor Daniel Schiff

Dr. Schiff Shaping AI Policy As a subject matter expert in technology policy and AI governance, Assistant Professor Daniel Schiff led a workshop in Indianapolis on March 18 in collaboration with the Future Caucus. The workshop explored the growing need to consider AI in policymaking. The Future Caucus is a national, nonpartisan organization that works with young policymakers across party lines.

During the session, Dr. Schiff provided an overview of the national and global AI policy landscape, discussed legislative trends and key challenges facing lawmakers, and provided resources that Indiana’s legislators can utilize when upskilling themselves on AI and when developing their own policy proposals.

Professor Ann Marie Clark

Distinguished Scholar Award for Dr. Ann Marie Clark Prof. Ann Marie Clark has been awarded the prestigious Distinguished Scholar Award by the International Studies Association's Human Rights Section. The award will be conferred at the 2025 International Studies Association Meeting in Chicago this week, where a panel discussion has been planned to honor her work.

Clark's research has focused on norms and discourse in international relations, the theory and practice of international human rights, and the influence of non-governmental organizations on state behavior. Her work has explored global justice and the ways in which changing ideas about justice take hold in global politics.

Group of five students at the Purdue Google AI Summit

Purdue-Google AI Summit Political Science graduate students joined GRAIL lab colleagues and co-director Professor Daniel Schiff at the AI Summit hosted by Purdue and Google. Dr. Schiff moderated the "Uniting Education, Business and Government" discussion panel.

Panel members addressed the challenges of creating and maintaining AI ethics and privacy initiatives, managing the complexities of AI regulation and governance under conditions of dynamism and uncertainty, and fostering effective interdisciplinary collaborations and organizational adaptation.

Purdue Commencement

Spotlight: Purdue PhD Program Celebrates Recent Student Success and Milestones "My time at Purdue was intellectually stimulating and set me up for success in my academic career" Janel Jett (PhD 2022, NCEC Sloan Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Harry S. Truman School of Government and Public Affairs).

Professor Kaylyn Jackson Schiff

Professor Daniel S. Schiff

"The Liar's Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability?" recently published research in the American Political Science Review by Dr. Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Dr. Daniel S. Schiff, and Dr. Natália S. Bueno, is gaining attention from journalists and think tanks as they seek to understand the potential impacts of artificial intelligence on elections.

Professor Jesse Crosson

The Department is excited to announce that Dr. Jesse M. Crosson received TWO Emerging Scholar awards at the 2024 American Political Science Association Meetings in Philadelphia. He is the winner of the 2024 APSA Legislative Studies Section Emerging Scholar Award and the 2024 APSA Political Organizations and Parties Section Emerging Scholar Award.

These awards reflect his exciting research agenda at the intersection of parties, interest groups, and legislative representation. He recently published the article “Do Local Roots Impact Washington Behaviors? District Connections and Representation in the U.S. Congress” in Political Science’s flagship journal, the American Political Science Review, and has a forthcoming article in Quarterly Journal of Political Science on moderation and legislative effectiveness in Congress.

Professor Eddie Yang

The Department is very pleased to welcome Assistant Professor Eddie Yang to the faculty! Dr. Yang recently completed his PhD at University of California San Diego holds a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University's Kellog Center for Science of Science of Innovation where is working on projects that explore how policies and political institutions shape technological innovation. On one project, he is evaluating the impact of industrial policies on the semiconductor industry and how to use AI to facilitate policy-relevant research.

Professor Brian Kogelmann

The Department is delighted to welcome Dr. Brian Kogelmann, Associate Professor of Political Science and Philosophy! Dr. Kogelmann brings a rich research agenda at the intersection of ethics and political economy.

He is particularly excited to be working on a project that explores the ethics of creative destruction: "AI is changing the world fast. Some predict it will result in massive job losses and the devaluation of human capital. Suppose you spend $100,000 getting an undergraduate degree, but five years later AI substitutes your labor. What should we think about this from the moral point of view?”

John Purdue

Interdisciplinary Foundations of Research Design in the Health, Behavioral, and Social Sciences—a new course available to graduate students and advanced undergraduates—aims to engage core issues in research design. How do we make a valid causal inference or a good behavioral forecast? What are the standards for evaluating the measurements of key concepts for a research study? What does it mean for a finding to be "statistically significant"? These are the kinds of questions we will be exploring in this new course available to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

Beering

Purdue Political Science is home to new research labs and programs to support multi-field research collaboration among faculty, post-docs, graduate, and undergraduate students. Lab themes address complex questions about technology, governance, institutions of democracy, law, conflict, political attitudes, and political behavior. They advance new tools for research such as audio and video analytics, computational methods, latent-variable measurement, experimental methods, and causal inference.

Purdue Arch

Purdue Political Science is thrilled to welcome ten new colleagues hired in the last two years including Andy Baker, Miram Barnum, Mollie Cohen, Jesse Crosson, Bryce Dietrich, Tyler Girard, Liana Eustacia Reyes, Daniel Schiff, Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, and Shan Zhou.

Scudder book cover

Professor Scudder's new book, "The Two Faces of Democracy: Decentering Agonism and Deliberation" tackles the question of how to defend democracy against anti-democratic forces. The book asks: How should defenders of democratic life respond to threats to democracy? Should those concerned use a strategy of conflict and resistance or more civil and deliberative strategies?

One of the crucial takeaways from the book is that both conflict and reasoned debate are central to democracy. Here, Scudder and White contribute to ongoing debates between deliberative democrats and agonistic democrats.

Assistant Professor Kaylyn Jackson Schiff

Professor Kaylyn Jackson Schiff receives Best Dissertation in the Field of Public Administration. Her research examines how innovative technological developments such as information and communication technologies used by governments inform and mobilize citizen participation which, in turn, shapes government accountability and responsiveness to its citizens.

Dr. Schiff joined Purdue in 2022 after completing her PhD at Emory University in 2022. She studies American politics and policy with a focus on the effect of emerging technology on society and governance. She held a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University during 2022-2023. At Purdue, she co-Directs the Governance and Responsible AI Lab (GRAIL) and engages in collaborative research on the social, ethical, and governance implications of artificial intelligence.

Ann Marie Clark

Professor Ann Marie Clark publishes new book that traces the evolution of a new international human rights ethos developed by activists in language, law, and practice over the past 50 years in Demands of Justice: The Creation of a Global Human Rights Practice.

Clark argues that these developments have led to the enrichment of “global justice,” and she takes developments in leading human rights organizations like Oxfam and Amnesty International as illustrative case studies.