DrNikita Khokhlov

Dr Nikita Khokhlov (SPIRe) is an Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations, working on comparative authoritarianism, political communication, political behaviour and propaganda with a regional focus on Russia and former Soviet states. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, Politics & Policy and Cross-Cultural Research. He has extensive training in quantitative methods and employs natural language processing, surveys, and experiments in his work. Previously, Nikita worked as a data scientist for the World Bank and Boston Consulting Group, and as a lecturer and teaching fellow at UCD, Dublin City University and Trinity College Dublin. Nikita completed his PhD dissertation at the School of Law and Government at DCU in 2024, where he used text-as-data methods to study the determinants of elite rhetoric and policymaking in Russia based on a wide range of data on public speeches and social media activity. He stayed at the University of Oxford as a visiting doctoral scholar.