Assistant Professor Kathleen Searles (Ph.D., Washington State University, 2011), holds
a joint appointment in the Manship School of Mass Communication and the
Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. Her interests include news media, campaign
advertising, and political psychology. Specifically, her research
examines the ways in which choice conditions media effects, with a particular
focus on the content of partisan news, and the influence of campaign ads on
political behavior. In the latter vein she has recently received several
grants to support her research using eye-tracking technology, part of a broader
agenda which influenced the advertising landscape of the 2016 presidential
election. Her work has appeared in Public
Opinion Quarterly, The Journal of
Computer Mediated Communication, Political
Research Quarterly, Political Communication, Journal of
Experimental Political Science, American Political Research, and
Political Psychology. She is currently working on a book manuscript
which investigates the effects of mobile devices on information
processing. She also serves on the
editorial board for womenalsoknowstuff.com, a site designed to amplify the
voice of women political scientists in public discourse and decrease the gender
imbalance in media representation of experts.