Barnhardt’s work focuses on various aspects of civic and public engagement, including how college students learn about and enact social responsibility, and how universities contribute to democracy and civic life. Of particular scholarly interest to Barnhardt is examining how different campus stakeholders mobilize around contentious public issues, and how campus administrators respond.

Barnhardt has published in the Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, Journal of College Student Development, Review of Higher Education, among others; and she has been a contributor to the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Higher Education Today blog. Some of her grant-funded work has been supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and DIKU- the Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education.  She teaches graduate courses on the higher education administration, policy, organizational behavior and management in postsecondary institutions, and research methods.

Barnhardt was a 2019 Fulbright Scholar to the Republic of Kosovo where she was embedded with the Ministry of Education advising the Higher Education department.