Jeffrey Tharsen

Jeffrey Tharsen is a Computational Scientist for the Digital Humanities at the University of Chicago., serving as university-wide technical domain expert for digital and computational approaches to humanistic inquiry. He received his doctorate in 2015 from the University of Chicago's East Asian Languages & Civilizations department., specializing in the fields of premodern Chinese philology, phonology, poetics and paleography. In his work, Jeffrey leads and advises text team researchers, and leads teams creating new resources, platforms and methods. for humanistic research, designs curricula and teaches courses and workshops on digital studies, data science, computational linguistics and natural language processing, serves on thesis committees and mentors students interested in developing new digital and computational research methods, and regularly presents his work at national and international conferences and symposia. During his graduate studies, Jeffrey 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 phono rhetoric; his first monograph, Chinese Euphonics, is to be published as part of the DeGruyter Worlds of East Asia series in 2021.

For Jeff, re-reading one of his favorite childhood books is like visiting an old friend: “comfortable, full of delights, and you always find something new you didn't notice before."