Julia Mendelsohn

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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 will be working as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago Data Science Institute. I am currently finishing my PhD at the University of Michigan School of Information, advised by Ceren Budak. I completed my BA in Linguistics (2018) and MS in Computer Science (2019) at 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.

news

Aug 05, 2024 I’m excited to join the University of Chicago Data Science Institute as a postdoc!
Jul 16, 2024 I will be attending IC2S2 in Philadelphia! I am presenting ongoing work (with Ceren Budak and Patrick Wall): Who Gets to Frame? Peer and Group-level Dynamics of Political Framing on Social Media, and Josh Ashkinaze is presenting our paper: How AI Ideas Affect the Creativity, Diversity, and Evolution of Human Ideas: Evidence From a Large, Dynamic Experiment (preprint)
Jun 28, 2024 I will be defending my dissertation, titled “Theory-grounded computational analysis of political framing in online media. See defense details here.
Jun 02, 2024 I am attending ICWSM 2024 in Buffalo to present our work on framing and social movements, published in the ICWSM Special Issue of the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.