The following FSU graduate students are currently seeking academic positions:
Austin Cutler
American Politics | Political Behavior
Austin Cutler is a Ph.D. candidate at Florida State University and Research Fellow for the LeRoy Collins Institute. His research focuses on political behavior, public opinion, and partisan polarization using observational and experimental methods. His dissertation examines the social identity foundations for people’s policy opinions, utilizing several original survey experiments of U.S. residents. In general, his dissertation finds that the social groups that support policies influence people’s own policy opinions, and that in particular how people feel towards their own group influences their policy positions. These findings generalize to several policy areas, including gun control and immigration, although there is some variation between policy areas. His work with the LeRoy Collins Institute focuses on policy outcomes, specifically on examining the best practices for transparency in elections, by building interactive data dashboards displaying election audit data and ballot images. He currently has several papers under review at top political science journals, including a revise and resubmit at The Journal of Politics (with Matthew Pietryka and Carlisle Rainey). He teaches several workshops on using the statistical software R for social science research and Understanding Political Science Research. He also has experience teaching the intro to American Politics, and Political Psychology courses as a TA.
Personal Website: austincutler.com
Marli Dunietz
American Politics | Behavioral Political Economy
Marli Dunietz is a scholar of behavioral political economy who studies American political behavior using theory-driven experiments. Her job market paper examines how media partisanship, and hence, beliefs about the political alignment of the news media’s audience, shapes whether uninformed voters decide to abstain or guess in elections. In the paper, she develops a formal model and demonstrates experimentally that, when uninformed, disaffected voters strategically guess, revealing new explanations for down-ballot participation gaps. Other working papers in her dissertation investigate citizens’ mental models about whether others’ partisanship drives policy preferences or vice versa, and how social rewards and sanctions shape political communication and the interpretation of reticence in group discussions. In work outside her dissertation, she examines how people interpret partisan consensus and disagreement by elites in Congress: partisan consensus indicates policy quality rather than compromise, which suggests that citizens have a mental model in which elite policy support depends on a combination of valence and particularistic concerns. Across her research, she uses theory-driven lab, survey, and field experiments, complemented with observational data, to understand the beliefs and meta-beliefs that shape political decision-making.
Personal Website: marliwd.github.io/web-publish
Chris Gahagan, Ph.D.
International Relations | International Political Economy
Christopher Gahagan received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Florida State University in 2026 and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. His research examines how globalization and international cooperation affect employment outcomes, with particular attention to workers in the informal economy. His work explores the effects of human rights treaties on women’s economic development, labor provisions in trade agreements, and labor-rights enforcement on formal and informal employment. A second strand of his research examines populist opposition to trade and its implications for international economic cooperation. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science and Politics and Governance.
Personal Website: ChrisGahagan.com
Hashim Malallah
International Relations | American Politics
Hashim Malallah is a Ph.D. candidate studying international conflict and cooperation, with a particular emphasis on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and American foreign policy. His dissertation focuses on the intersection of domestic and international politics to explain variation in third-party support for conflict actors, using the Question of Palestine as a case study. Methodologically, his work combines causal inference techniques for observational data, machine learning, and text-as-data methods. Aside from his dissertation, Hashim’s job market paper, currently a revise-and-resubmit at International Studies Quarterly, examines when and how U.S. diplomatic visits shape the onset and durability of Arab-Israeli normalization agreements. His research appears in Nations and Nationalism, and his other co-authored project on the effects of U.S. presidential visits on host-state policy concessions is currently under review. Hashim has served as instructor of record for American Foreign Policy and Introduction to American Government, and he mentors undergraduate students through FSU’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP).
Personal Website: https://hmalallah.github.io/HashimMalallah/