Dr. Leah Windsor is a Research Assistant Professor in the Institute for Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis where she directs the Languages Across Cultures and Languages Across Modalities labs. She received her Bachelor of Science in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 1998, her Master’s degree in Political Science at The University of Memphis in 2005, and her Ph.D. in Political Science from The University of Mississippi in 2012. Dr. Windsor served as PI for a DoD Minerva Initiative grant that examines political communication in authoritarian regimes and opaque political groups. 

Her work uses computational linguistics and discourse analysis to answer questions about leadership and regime traits, language and cognition, propaganda and persuasion, bluffs and threats, and radicalization. Her interdisciplinary approach to understanding political language is situated at the intersection of political science, linguistics, and cognitive science. She is also interested in issues of bias and ethnocentrism in studying political language, including corpus selection, translation, and document preparation. 

In 2018, she launched the QuantText website to serve as a repository for quantitative text analysis research. Her work has been published in Political Communication, PLOS-ONE, International Interactions, Political Research Quarterly, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Terrorism and Political Violence, and she serves on the Editorial Board of International Studies Quarterly and International Studies Perspectives. Her book on bias in family formation in academia, The PhD Parenthood Trap: Caught Between Work and Family in Academia (with Dr. Kerry Crawford) is forthcoming with Georgetown University Press.