Leah Windsor, Ph.D.

Leah Windsor is a research assistant professor in the Institute for Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis. She received her B.S. in linguistics from Georgetown University in 1998, her M.S. in political science at The University of Memphis in 2005, and her Ph.D. in political science from The University of Mississippi in 2012. She currently serves as PI for a Minerva Initiative grant administered by the U.S. Department of Defense that examines political communication in authoritarian regimes and opaque political groups. Her work uses computational linguistics and discourse analysis to answer questions about regime survival, comparative institutions, political crisis and conflict, propaganda and persuasion, bluffs and threats, governance, and radicalization. Her interdisciplinary approach to understanding political language is situated at the intersection of political science, linguistics, and cognitive science. In February 2017, her lab was selected for a Team Initiation Grant by the University of Memphis’ Division of Research and Sponsored Programs to study multimodal communication including language, nonverbal cues, and audiovisual elements.