Hire a PhD in Political Science

Website: www.babaadou.com

Research Interests: Religion and politics | State-Islam relations | Civil-military relations | post-coup transitions

Baba Adou is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Florida, specializing in Comparative Politics and International Relations, with a regional focus on the African Sahel and North Africa. His research examines how security crises involving religiously framed insurgencies push Muslim-majority states to intervene more deeply in religious life and how those interventions reshape the public religious sphere and broader state–society relations.

His dissertation develops a comparative historical analysis of Mali and Mauritania, examining how jihadist-inspired insurgencies have reshaped state–religion relations and generated new forms of state engagement with religion. His academic and policy research has appeared in POMEPS Studies, Souffles Monde, the Africa Yearbook, and Afrobarometer. He has also contributed country analysis and expert assessments to V-Dem, Freedom House, and the Bertelsmann Transformation Index.

Before beginning his doctoral studies, he taught for more than six years at the university level in Mauritania. He holds an M.A. in Global and International Studies from the University of Kansas, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar (2013–2015), and a B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Nouakchott, Mauritania.

Adjunct Lecturer

Univ of Florida, 2025

Stephanie Denardo holds a PhD in Political Science, specializing in International Relations at the University of Florida. Her research combines her experience in journalism with feminist perspectives to investigate constructions of power and order in the global system. Denardo focuses primarily on feminist IR theory, theories of IR, historical political sociology, and archival research methodologies.

Denardo’s dissertation tells an alternative history of how a discipline of International Relations was built in the US following WWII, recovering the women and marginalized peoples and perspectives involved in its construction. She investigates how gendered, racialized processes of discipline-maintenance materialized in the 1950s through 60s, and their implications for a discipline and theories of global politics today. For this project, Denardo conducted extensive archival research at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New York City, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the Center for Jewish History.

Denardo teaches "Introduction to International Relations" and the advanced undergraduate courses "Theories of International Relations," "Gender and International Relations," as well as "Politics of the World Economy" in the Department of Political Science at UF. She received the Best Graduate Student Teacher Award in the Department for 2023-2024. Previously, she served as the International Relations Editorial Assistant for Perspectives on Politics (Cambridge University Press) from 2019-2023 and assisted with the journal Review of International Political Economy from 2023-2025. Denardo received a National Science Foundation Grant in 2018 for her PhD student fellowship.

Website: pgupte.com

Research Interests: : Civil-military relations | Democratization | Global South | Party systems | Authoritarian regimes

Prajakta is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Political Science, University of Florida. Her research interests lie in the sub-fields of Comparative Politics and International Relations. Broadly, her research deals with issues related to civil-military relations, authoritarianism, and democratization in Southeast Asia. Currently, my research focuses on how military entrepreneurship has influenced democratization in some Southeast Asian and Latin American countries.

She graduated from Pennsylvania State University's School of International Affairs with a Master's degree in International Affairs in May 2017. At Penn State, her specialization was in international security in South and Southeast Asia and her research focused on issues such as the Rohingya Crisis and internal conflicts in Myanmar.
Before coming to the United States, she completed my undergraduate degree in Journalism from Ramnarain Ruia College, University of Mumbai, and a graduate degree (M.A.) in Political Science from S.N.D.T. Women's University, Mumbai.

Website: longxiao-lx.com

Research Interests: U.S.-China Relations | U.S. Foreign Policy | China Politics | Securitization | International Governance

Long Xiao is currently a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Florida. His research interests focus on U.S.-China relations and U.S. foreign policy, with particular emphasis placed on securitization. His dissertation has been devoted to examining the motivations and actors responsible for the heightened perception of China as a threat in U.S. congressional discourse over the past decade. His research has been published in the International Journal of Strategic Communication and Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene.

Long Xiao is originally from Shenzhen, China. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pittsburg State University in Political Science and International Studies in 2019.