Associate Technology Director, Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History

Jeffrey Tharsen is the Associate Technology Director for Digital Studies. He investigates, designs, and implements software solutions for faculty and student projects. He holds a doctorate in East Asian philology, poetics, phonology, and paleography from the University of Chicago and has expertise in advanced computational methods for philological and linguistic research and for data analysis and visualization. His decades-long engagement with computational methods has given him extensive experience in creating digital resources, platforms, and methods for all kinds of humanities research. He teaches courses on data analysis for the humanities, deep learning (AI), and multilingual natural language processing (NLP). He also advises MA thesis projects and mentors students in developing new digital tools and resources.

Jeff regularly presents his own research at national and international conferences and serves on committees devoted to developing advanced technologies for the humanities. During his graduate studies, he received a Fulbright award for his Digital Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, a new type of software suite which facilitates large-scale analyses of early Chinese phonetic patterning and phonorhetoric; his first monograph, Chinese Euphonics, is to be published as part of the DeGruyter Worlds of East Asia series in 2023.

Heading photo: Digital reconstruction of “Raided Village” mural, Temple of the Warriors, Chichen Itza, by Magdalena Glotzer, AB ’19 (2019), based on a 1931 reconstruction by Ann Axtel Morris and diagrams from Morris, Earl Halstead. The Temple of the warriors at Chichen Itzá, Yucatan. Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1931.