Julia Mendelsohn

Julia Mendelsohn is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information and Department of Government and Politics, starting August 2025. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago Data Science Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of language, politics, and computation, with expertise in computational linguistics, political communication, and sociolinguistics.

• Education: PhD in Information (University of Michigan), BA in Linguistics and MS in Computer Science (Stanford University)

Her research explores computational models of political rhetoric, dehumanization in discourse, and the societal impacts of language technologies. Notable projects include analyzing framing in immigration debates, Russian wartime media, and developing tools to combat antisemitism.

Recent work includes studies on metaphor usage in immigration discourse (2025), AI agent truthfulness trade-offs (2024), and the role of multilingual users in social media (2023). She has been recognized with awards such as the Google PhD Fellowship and the 2023 Outstanding Methodology Award.

• Awards: Google PhD Fellowship, NSF Honorable Mention, ICWSM Outstanding Methodology Award (2023)

Julia is actively recruiting PhD students for Fall 2025, emphasizing interdisciplinary approaches in NLP, computational social science, and political communication. She collaborates with research centers like the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab and the Global Elections and Information Security (GEIS) group.