[SydPhil] Job: postdoc in digital humanities/philosophy of science | HPS, University of Sydney, Australia

Kate Lynch kate.lynch at sydney.edu.au
Tue Nov 3 17:47:59 AEDT 2026


  *   Full time, 2 years fixed term, with the potential for extension to a 3rd year
  *   Lead innovative research using AI-powered text analysis to reveal how concepts are used academically, in the media and across social
  *
Base Salary, Academic level A $117,936 - $125,896 + 17% superannuation (AUD)


About the opportunity
 The School of History and Philosophy of Science<https://www.sydney.edu.au/science/schools/school-of-history-and-philosophy-of-science.html> at the University of Sydney is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate - Digital Humanities / Philosophy of Science to develop and deploy bibliometric methods and text classification models to identify concepts and conceptual patterns in large bodies of text.
This research forms a part of two ARC Discovery Project(s) ‘Genes germs and gender: the rise and impact of bioessentialism’ and ‘Symbiotic Synergies: How the Body Became a Chimera (1950-2000)’. The successful candidate will join a large, interdisciplinary research group of philosophers, historians, psychologists, and scientists, contributing empirical evidence to support the group's philosophical investigations.
Building on existing methodologies within the research group, the candidate will design, train, and validate new classification models capable of detecting conceptual and rhetorical features across large text corpora, and will lead the construction of these corpora from media, social media, and academic sources.

Your key responsibilities will be to:

  *   curate, clean and structure large text corpora from news media, social media and academic literature
  *   develop and refine automated classification pipelines using machine learning and LLM approaches
  *   design prompting strategies to optimise classifier precision and recall
  *   contribute to the interpretation of classification outputs in light of philosophical and psychological theories and concepts
  *   co-author peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations
  *   contribute to open science practices, including preparing code, data and documentation for public repositories (e.g. OSF).

About You

  *   a PhD in a relevant field in the digital humanities
  *   experience curating, cleaning and structuring large corpora
  *   experience using NLP and/or ML to build and evaluate text classification models
  *   experience in prompt engineering techniques
  *   an interest in interdisciplinary collaboration
  *   the ability to translate conceptual research questions into computational tasks
  *   strong written communication skills and a track record of peer-reviewed publication
  *   the ability to work independently and as part of a collaborative, interdisciplinary team.

Applications close 6th Dec AEST
For more information and how to apply see: https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/OdnxCNLJyQU9zY7nOFmf28tyjG_d?domain=wd105.myworkday.com

Enquiries about the role can be directed to kate.lynch at sydney.edu.au



Dr Kate Lynch

Senior Lecturer, School of History and Philosophy of Science
Room 389 Carslaw Building (F07) | The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006

kate.lynch at sydney.edu.au


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