Faculty Profile

Christianna Parr is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at SMU. She completed her PhD in Political Science at the University of Washington, where she was the Duck Family Graduate Fellow at the Center for Environmental Politics and affiliated with the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences. Prior to joining SMU, she taught comparative politics, world politics and political methodology at the University of Washington, where she received the departmental teaching award. Her research has been published in Global Policy and is forthcoming in the Journal of Public Policy. Christianna’s commentary on environmental issues has been published in The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage.
Her research focuses on civil society and environmental politics in Southeast Asia. She is interested in the legitimacy of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and environmental NGOs in authoritarian and hybrid regimes. Christianna’s methodological work includes survey and conjoint experiments and machine learning. She is currently preparing a book-length project based on her dissertation, Shaping Civil Society: Media, Donors and Public Trust in Southeast Asian NGOs, and has several ongoing projects on social media communication, public attitudes toward AI use in the nonprofit sector, and environmental advocacy in the Southeast Asian region.

Qualifications

• PhD, Political Science, University of Washington, 2025
• MA in Political Science, University of Washington, 2018
• BA in Political Science, University of Washington, 2015