Ani Tepnadze is an assistant professor of political science at Seton Hill University. She works on questions of disinformation, ethnic groups, the technologization of democracy, and the role of social media in grievance mobilization. Her geographical area of expertise is the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. In her dissertation, "Application of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to Understand the Partisan Mobilization of Ethnic Minorities," she studied over 100 minority groups across 21 countries, including Russian speakers in Latvia and Mingrelians in Georgia, to explore how and why some groups mobilize around their identities while others remain unorganized. Her theory of intra-linguistic and socioeconomic cleavages posits that when ethnic groups are not internally divided along linguistic or socioeconomic lines, they are more likely to form parties around their ethnic grievances.
Her current research examines how social media platforms handle disinformation and hate speech and whether public support for their content moderation policies varies across countries. In particular, her research investigates whether trust in and legitimacy of digital communications platforms mediate public support for regulating disinformation and hate speech online. This project explores whether public perceptions of online communications platforms as normatively and empirically fair influence people's approval of content moderation policies against hate speech and deepfakes.
At Seton Hill, Dr. Tepnadze has taught or will teach courses in International Relations, Global Political Economy, Governance and Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence, Research Methods, and Public Opinion and Propaganda. She directs the Model United Nations program and takes students to Model UN conferences in New York.
Education
Ph.D., Political Science, West Virginia University, 2025
Publications
“Evaluating the Partisan Effects of Pandemic Mitigation with Polling Place Data from the Republic of Georgia”, with Erik Herron, Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy, 2025, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 225–245 https://doi.org/10.1089/elj.2024.0016
“Russian Anti-Western Disinformation, Media Consumption, and Public Opinion in the Republic of Georgia”, with Ralph Clem and Erik Herron, Europe-Asia Studies, 2023, Vol. 75, No. 9, pp. 1535–1559 https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2023.2220997
