Academic Administrator II Apply now to Academic Administrator II
Job #JPF10697
UCLA CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES / L&S Humanities / UCLA
Position overview Position title: Coordinator of the UCLA Project "AI and Extremism"
Salary range: $74,842 - $104,049
Review timeline: December 19, 2025
Application Window
Open date: November 10, 2025
Next review date: Friday, Dec 19, 2025 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Apply by this date to ensure full consideration by the committee.
Final date: Monday, Dec 22, 2025 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled.
Position description
Overview:
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.
The duties of the Coordinator are as follows:
Academic Mentorship and Project Leadership (20%)
? 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.
Data Analysis and Programming (40%)
? 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
Public Engagement (20%)
? 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.
Instruction and Course Development (20%)
? 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.
Qualifications
Basic qualifications
Academic Credentials & Teaching Experience
? 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:
? AI Ethics and/or Science Technology Studies
? Holocaust Studies, Critical Race Studies, and/or Memory Studies
? Digital Humanities
? Media Studies and Communication
? Ability to design and teach interdisciplinary, humanities-based curricula addressing AI, digital humanities, and/or social media analysis
Research Proficiencies
Digital Humanities & Memory Studies
? 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
Critical AI Scholarship
? 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
Technical Proficiencies
? 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
Leadership & Collaboration
? 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
Preferred qualifications
Advanced Technical Skills
? 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
Data Expertise
? 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
Visualization & Public Engagement
? 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.
Application Requirements
Document requirements
Curriculum Vitae - Your most recently updated C.V.
Cover Letter
Statement of Research
Reference check authorization release form - Complete and upload the reference check authorization release form
UCLA Mission Statement - As the nation's premier public research university, UC's mission is the creation, dissemination, preservation and application of knowledge for the betterment of our global society. We have a particular responsibility to the people of California which we express in the excellence of the education we provide, the impact of the research we do, the comprehensive, life-saving medical services we provide, and the public service mission we are devoted to. The University of California promotes the social mobility of its students, equips them with the tools and experience that furthers their ambitions, and regards their accomplishments across the life span as evidence of the profoundly positive impact of higher education.
The UCLA campus has expressed these goals in its strategic plan as follows:
Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles
Expand our reach as a global university
Enhance our research and creative activities
Elevate how we teach
Become a more effective institution
Prompt for candidates for recruitment:
Reflecting on your personal and professional experiences, highlight your past contributions and future commitments to advancing UCLA's mission as embodied in the 2023-28 strategic plan. These accomplishments and ambitions may be discussed in the @context of describing your teaching, scholarship, and service
Statement of Teaching
Reference requirements
3-5 required (contact information only)
Provide email address, name and affiliation of your references.
Apply link: https://recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10697
Help contact: rchung@humnet.ucla.edu
About UCLA
As a University employee, you will be required to comply with all applicable University policies and/or collective bargaining agreements, as may be amended from time to time. Federal, state, or local government directives may impose additional requirements.
The University of California is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, protected veteran status, or other protected status under state or federal law.
As a condition of employment, the finalist will be required to disclose if they are subject to any final administrative or judicial decisions within the last seven years determining that they committed any misconduct, are currently being investigated for misconduct, left a position during an investigation for alleged misconduct, or have filed an appeal with a previous employer.
"Misconduct" means any violation of the policies or laws governing conduct at the applicant's previous place of employment, including, but not limited to, violations of policies or laws prohibiting sexual harassment, sexual assault, or other forms of harassment, discrimination, dishonesty, or unethical conduct, as defined by the employer.
UC Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment Policy (https://policy.ucop.edu/doc/4000385/SVSH)
UC Anti-Discrimination Policy for Employees, Students and Third Parties
APM - 035: Affirmative Action and Nondiscrimination in Employment (https://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/_files/apm/apm-035.pdf)
Job location
Los Angeles, CA
