Academic Administrator II

UCLA•Los Angeles, CA

54d

About The Position

The incumbent will be the Coordinator of a two-year project on "AI and Extremism." They will lead a range of research, teaching, and public outreach activities addressing the ways that AI technologies can be weaponized to spread hate speech and propagate political extremism as well as develop ways that such extremism can be mitigated and fought. Examples of extremism to be addressed by the initiative include the following: the use of AI to foster Holocaust denial and Holocaust inversion; how social media and AI technologies can be used to amplify and spread white supremacy, antisemitism, and racism; the specific ways that AI technologies (ranging from large language models and chatbots to image and video generation tools) can be used to distort and falsify history, including the creation of deep-fakes; and the use of AI to spread propaganda, create echo chambers, and amplify misinformation. In addition to documenting the prevalence of such speech, the position will also develop hate speech detection models (including data harvesting, data analysis, and real-time detection) to identify the prevalence and spread of such speech online; foster strategic partnerships across UCLA (such as with the Initiative to Study Hate, the Working Group in Memory Studies, and DataX) as well as major cultural institutions such as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the USC Shoah Foundation to address new challenges in Holocaust education in the 21st century; teach up to two classes per year in UCLA's Digital Humanities program and/or other interdisciplinary fields; and participate in public outreach activities including scholarly dissemination, seminars, and/or conferences. This position is an Academic Administrator II and will report to Professor Todd Presner, Director of the UCLA "AI and Cultural Heritage Lab," and be housed with the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. This is a two-year appointment, which will conclude with a series of deliverables including a comprehensive research progress report, course syllabi, project-specific datasets, and public presentations.

Requirements

Ph.D. in-hand as of January 2026. Ph.D. can come from any field, although preference will be given to Humanities, humanistic Social Sciences, Information Studies, Communication, and Science Technology Studies.
Demonstrated teaching experience at the undergraduate and/or graduate level in one or more of the following areas: â AI Ethics and/or Science Technology Studies â Holocaust Studies, Critical Race Studies, and/or Memory Studies â Digital Humanities â Media Studies and Communication
Ability to design and teach interdisciplinary, humanities-based curricula addressing AI, digital humanities, and/or social media analysis
Computational Analysis: Experience analyzing texts, images, videos, historical corpora, and/or social media data using computational tools and methods
Ethical Research Practices: Demonstrated ability to engage with sensitive and difficult material using appropriate ethical and methodological frameworks
Humanities Methods: Ability to integrate humanities methodologies from fields such as memory studies, history, media studies, critical race studies, and/or Holocaust studies
Multiscalar Methodologies: Knowledge of methods spanning close reading, corpus-level analysis, and historical contextualization; ability to operationalize humanistic approaches (narrative analysis, historical analysis, ethical frameworks) into computational frameworks for large-scale analysis
Scholarly publications or public projects addressing AI ethics, algorithmic injustice, or cultural politics of computation
Demonstrated ability to critique and contextualize AI-generated outputs within broader histories of race, antisemitism, white supremacy, and technological governance
Engagement with historical or contemporary propaganda, disinformation, or platform-mediated extremism
Proficiency in data science and natural language processing techniques for digital humanities research
AI/Machine Learning Experience: experience working with generative AI, large language models, and machine learning
Experience mentoring undergraduate research assistants and graduate students
Demonstrated leadership of research collectives, working groups, or digital projects
Track record of interdisciplinary collaboration in university settings
Ability to manage complex research workflows across multiple contributors while maintaining intellectual cohesion and technical reproducibility
Experience with grant writing or securing research funding for digital humanities projects

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with AI interpretability techniques (attention visualization, model behavior analysis)
Knowledge of hate speech detection models or adversarial NLP
NLP Expertise: Experience with nltk, spaCy, or similar frameworks
Experience with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
Familiarity developing Agentic AI pipelines (autonomous AI systems that can perform complex, multi-step tasks)
Experience with embedding models for similarity search or corpus clustering
Prompt engineering for large language models
Integration of AI frameworks (transformers, fine-tuned classification models) into humanities research workflows
Ability to explain machine learning concepts to undergraduate students and non-technical stakeholders
Experience designing or managing large text-based corpora from archival sources and online environments
Experience with social media datasets and archives
Experience with data extraction from unstructured data
Knowledge of web archiving, API access, web-scraping
Proficiency with visualization tools (D3.js, Plotly) for visualizing humanistic data
Experience developing digital exhibits, story maps, or interactive interfaces for scholarly and public audiences
Publication record in a related field such as critical AI studies, digital humanities, memory studies, and Holocaust studies.

Responsibilities

As Coordinator, serve as project lead for the "AI and Extremism" initiative; collaborate with team members to realize projects.
Through the "AI and Cultural Heritage Lab," lead research collectives, working groups, and digital projects, fostering collaboration and shared intellectual direction for the initiative.
Liaise with interdisciplinary groups across the university, ensuring visibility across departments
Represent the project publicly in workshops, conferences, and other presentations
Mentor undergraduate research assistants and graduate students, providing guidance in both technical skills and scholarly practice.
Manage complex research workflows involving multiple contributors, maintaining both intellectual cohesion and technical reproducibility.
Identify grants opportunities, develop proposals, and secure funding to support expansion of digital humanities projects and of the UCLA Initiative in AI and Extremism.
Use Python-based tools and workflows to design, build, and manage large-scale text- and image-based corpora drawn from archival sources and online environments.
Work with social media datasets and archives applying methods for data extraction from structured and unstructured sources.
Conduct web archiving, access data through APIs, and perform web scraping to support research, such as semantic search and text classification.
Stay current with scholarly publications and public projects on AI ethics, algorithmic justice, and the cultural politics of computation.
Critically assess and contextualize AI-generated outputs within broader histories of race, white supremacy, and technological governance.
Analyze historical and contemporary materials related to propaganda, disinformation, and platform-mediated extremism to prepare essays, courses, reports, and/or presentations.
Design and apply prompt engineering strategies for large language models
Develop digital exhibits, storytelling applications, and interactive interfaces that connect scholarly research with public audiences.
Create and interpret visualizations of humanistic data using advanced visualization tools.
Produce and disseminate research-informed materials across fields such as critical AI studies, digital humanities, memory studies, and Holocaust studies.
Translate complex research outcomes into accessible formats for academic peers, educators, and the broader community.
Participate in public-facing outreach, including scholarly dissemination seminars and academic conferences.
In collaboration with the Director, design and teach courses examining how AI technologies can be weaponized to spread hate speech and political extremism, as well as strategies to mitigate and counter such extremism.
Teach up to two classes per year in UCLA's Digital Humanities program and/or other interdisciplinary programs.
Work with key stakeholders at UCLA such as DataX to develop curricular initiatives.
Develop curricular materials that integrate technical training, critical theory, and applied case studies.