Time: Tuesday, September 29, 9:00-10:30 AM

Zoom ID: 939 5251 1301; Passcode: 522582

Speaker: Kenny Miao, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin

About the Speaker

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. I received my M.A. in Political Science from Duke University and my B.A. in Political Science from Wuhan University.

I am a comparativist working on religion and politics, with China as my primary regional focus and the United States as a second empirical setting. Three questions drive my research: how large political and economic disruptions reshape a society’s religious landscape, how religious groups navigate widespread social hostility, and how the way churches organize authority shapes whether their members trust important secular institutions in democracies. I have also developed a methodological interest in measuring sensitive attitudes and behavior under authoritarian regimes. My work draws on experiments, causal inference with observational data, large-scale digital data, archival research, and fieldwork.