Cheyenne Black

Cheyenne Black is a postdoctoral fellow at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), based in Washington, D.C. She studies how the United States governs space, focusing on the actors, coalitions, and institutions that set national priorities as the domain becomes more commercial and contested. Her work applies discourse network analysis and natural language processing to congressional hearings, executive documents, and international proceedings, tracing how policy debates evolve over time.

Cheyenne earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Oklahoma and her B.S. in Political Science from Appalachian State University. She was a summer associate and adjunct at the RAND Corporation, where she contributed to Project AIR FORCE work on modernizing legacy space systems for the U.S. Space Force. At Oklahoma’s Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis she worked on projects spanning national security, nuclear risk, and environmental policy, and she served twice at the U.S. Department of State, supporting research on global public opinion and coordinating air quality monitoring across the Department, EPA, NASA, and the U.S. Forest Service.

Plans for Fellowship: Cheyenne will prepare journal articles from her dissertation and begin a related project on institutional change in defense governance. That project asks how public-private partnerships and technological innovation redraw institutional boundaries, and how the resulting arrangements shape strategic priorities.