Cristina Monzer, Ph.D.

Cristina Monzer is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Deen Freelon’s Research Lab. Her research examines how identity, social media platforms, and political communication impact political engagement.

Cristina Monzer is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Deen Freelon's Research Lab at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Her research investigates how social media platforms privilege certain identities in contemporary political debates, developing methodological frameworks to analyze identity markers in multimodal content using computational social science techniques. Her current work focuses on identity representation in deportation discourse.

Monzer studies how group identities—including nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, and class—become visible through societal symbols and values, examining how these elements shape public interpretation of current issues. Her doctoral research analyzed cultural influences on COVID-19 pandemic framing in online debates, conceptualizing cultural resonance as an interpretative process shaped by cultural knowledge, political preferences, and situational factors. Her interdisciplinary approach combines political communication, cultural sociology, social psychology, and linguistics, utilizing cross-national surveys, discourse analysis, and computational methods.