Alyvia
Walters

Alyvia Walters (she/her) earned her Ph.D. in Media Studies from Rutgers University in 2024. Prior to Rutgers, she got her master's degree in English from Georgetown University, as well as a B.A. in English and B.S. in Secondary English and Communication Education from the Pennsylvania State University. Before returning to academia for graduate-level education, she gained experience as a high school English teacher in central Pennsylvania.

Now a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Library & Information Science (LIS), Alyvia is uniting her research interests in social media, political rhetoric, news, and identity to complete a wide variety of mixed-methods projects, and she is a contributing member of the Computational Social Science Lab. Further, she is seeking to expand her dissertation work on the weaponization of child-centered rhetorics in online political speech. Her research has been published in venues such as New Media & Society and The International Journal of Communication. 

Aside from her appointment in LIS, she is also an instructor in the Department of Journalism & Media Studies, teaching courses such as "Gender, Race, and Class in the Media" and "Introduction to Media." She is an alumna of the Eagleton Institute of Politics Graduate Fellowship Program, and has won both research and teaching awards.

When she is not pursuing her professional goals, she loves to garden, cook, make art, read for pleasure, do yoga, and take long walks in her Philadelphia neighborhood.