Li’s substantive research focuses on everyday resistance in authoritarian regimes. Methodologically, she is interested in text-as-data, network analysis, multimodal data, and survey experiments. Her teaching interests include computational and statistical methods for the social sciences, AI and society, and comparative politics. While she has published work and working papers in cross-national contexts, her regional expertise is China. Her work appears in Social Media + Society.

Li holds a B.A. in Political Science from McGill University and a dual-title Ph.D. in Political Science and Social Data Analytics from Pennsylvania State University.