Biography
In the 2025–2026 academic year, Alexis Palmer will be a Teaching Fellow in Tulane University’s Political Science Department. Starting in 2026, she will be an Assistant Professor of Data Analytics within Political Science at Tulane. Prior to this appointment, Palmer was a Neukom Fellow affiliated with the Government Department and the Minds, Machine, and Society Group in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth College. She earned her PhD from the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University in September 2024. Her dissertation focused on institutional trust, storytelling, and natural language processing methods, but these serve mainly as the nexus points of many research interests.
The central theme of much of Palmer's work is trust: why do people trust the institutions, leaders, and information that they do. This work is rarely focused on the actual performance of these dimensions and instead asks what shapes perceptions and persuades. This interest has led her to focus on micro-founded data and individual level analysis, with a particular interest in Text as Data as a way to operationalize difficult to measure concepts such as what makes a story. The actual topics she works on have spanned conflict governance, cynicism in politics, and the role of Large Language Models.
Research Interests
Institutional trust and legitimacy, Text as Data methodology, Storytelling and narrative influence, Political cynicism, & Large Language Models in political research