Nia Atkins is a first-year PhD student in Princeton University’s Politics Department. Her subfields are race and ethnic politics and American politics. Her research interests consist mainly of Black American political attitudes, communication, and behavior. More specifically, her projects have focused on traditional and social media, social policy areas including labor, public health, and child welfare, and attitudes towards gender and masculinity. Moving forward, Nia hopes to investigate the lasting socio-political impacts of historical racial exclusion policies in the United States. She also intends to examine how race intersects with gender, sexuality, socio-economic status, and immigration to influence political attitudes among Black Americans and other marginalized communities. Furthermore, she aims to employ various methodological tools in her exploration of such topics, including survey data, text analysis, experimental methods, and qualitative interviews. Ultimately, through her research, Nia seeks to deepen our understanding of race and power in American politics. By investigating the historical and contemporary mechanisms that shape Black socio-political engagement, she hopes to produce scholarship that not only diagnoses systemic inequalities but also informs meaningful change.
The APSA Diversity Fellowship Program, formerly the Minority Fellowship Program, was established in 1969 as a fellowship competition to diversify the political science profession. The DFP provides support to students applying to, or in the early stages of, a PhD program in political science. APSA has once again awarded a new cycle to provide support for students currently in their first or second year as of Spring 2025. Please join us in congratulating the 2025-2026 class of fellows.
- Learn more about DFP at https://apsanet.org/dfp
- Meet the 2025-2026 class of DFP Fellows