Julia Mendelsohn

Prospective Students: I am recruiting PhD students to begin in Fall 2025! Prospective PhD students should apply to the PhD program in Information Studies at UMD, and note your interest in working with me in the statement.

I am an incoming Assistant Professor (beginning August 2025) at the University of Maryland, jointly appointed in the College of Information and Department of Government and Politics. In the meantime, I am currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago Data Science Institute. I completed my PhD in Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, and hold a BA in Linguistics and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University.

My research lies at the intersection of language, politics, and computation. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I draw from diverse fields including natural language procesing (NLP), political communication, sociolinguistics, and psychology. I am particularly interested in computationally modeling subtle rhetoric in online political discussions, and understanding the social, political and technological implications of such language.

Here are some directions that I have worked on and continue to be excited about:

1. Framing of complex sociopolitical issues in news and social media, and the broader implications of these linguistic choices. I have studied framing in the context of immigration and social movements on Twitter and Russian media posts about the Russia-Ukraine war.
2. Implicitly (and sometimes covertly) harmful language in discussions about marginalized communities. I have published work about developing computational approaches to study dehumanization and dogwhistle communication. Starting with my work on dogwhistles, I have recently become especially interested in building language technologies to study and combat antisemitism.
3. Computational sociolinguistics. I have done some work on language variation, change, and social meaning in online communities (and would love to do more!). I am interested in bridging sociolinguistics and computational social science to understand the relationship between linguistic practices and social networks

You can find more information about me from my curriculum vitae.