Jobs/Dec 20, 2022

Assistant Professor of Humanities Data Science. University of Washington

Assistant Professor of Humanities Data Science. University of Washington lead image

The Division of the Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Non-Anglophone Humanities Data Science. The successful candidate will be appointed to one of the eight departments in the Division: Asian Languages and Literature, French and Italian Studies, German Studies, Linguistics, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, Scandinavian Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Spanish and Portuguese Studies.

The successful candidate for this position, researching and teaching primarily in one or several languages other than English, will be expected to :

  • create, analyze, use, present and communicate data, broadly understood, in disciplines of language, literature, and/or culture
  • explore a variety of forms of data including large historical or contemporary corpora, textual archives, digital media and genres, or online datasets and their uses
  • engage a range of analytical techniques and methods of analysis
  • investigate questions and challenges posed by data science and by data, such as the role of bias in algorithms, uncertainty in artificial intelligence, and/or the use of ever-larger datasets in machine translation
  • engage in an active research agenda

Since this is a cross-disciplinary position, the successful applicant will also be expected to work across departmental and disciplinary boundaries, and contribute to the development of existing cross-disciplinary initiatives (e.g., Translation Studies Hub, Textual and Digital Studies, Global Literary Studies) and to new curricula and programs in areas of inquiry such as human and machine translation, computational text analysis, AI and creativity, the future of language learning.

In particular, this position has been created in conjunction with the establishment of a new minor in Data Science intended for Social Science and Humanities students. The candidate hired into this position will dedicate 25% of their teaching and service responsibilities to this program, with the remainder determined within the context of the appointing department. The successful candidate will be expected to take a leading role in the minor, including developing and teaching courses in the required Data Skills and Data Studies categories, and serving on the Steering and Curriculum Committees of the Data Science minor.

Candidates should in addition be prepared to take full advantage of the rich array of resources at the UW for research and teaching in data science as well as in the digital humanities, including the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the eScience Institute, the Open Scholarship Commons in the UW Libraries, and the Humanities Data Lab.
Applicants must, by the start of the appointment, have a PhD, or foreign equivalent, in a field consistent with an appointment in a department in the Division of the Humanities.

The successful candidate must have a record of innovative and effective teaching and student mentoring; and a record of contribution to departmental or institutional diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.