Liuya Zhang (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at The Ohio State University, specializing in International Relations (IR) and Political Methodology. Her research focuses on postcolonial IR theory, identity politics in IR, public opinion, and foreign policy in the Global South, with a regional focus on the Asia-Pacific. Methodologically, she employs a quantitative interpretive approach to examine the evolution of identity and foreign policy discourse over time. Her dissertation investigates how identity-driven narratives shape postcolonial states' foreign policy orientations.

Liuya is actively involved with the MESO Lab and the Machine Intelligence and Data Science Lab at OSU, where she applies pre-trained large language models to analyze Chinese leaders’ perceptions of the international order. Her work advances postcolonial IR by bridging computational methods with interpretive analysis, offering a more nuanced understanding of identity formation in global politics.

She holds a B.A. in Korean Language and Literature from Fudan University, a Master of Area Studies (East Asia) from Seoul National University, and a Master of International Affairs from UC San Diego. Beyond academia, she contributes as an author to the Korea Economic Institute of America and Asia Times.