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Dr. Lisa Baer-Tsarfati is an intellectual historian, computational linguist, and critical AI researcher whose work examines language as a structure of power within political and knowledge systems. She holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, an MSc by Research from the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD from the University of Guelph.

Her research is grounded in early modern Scottish and British political culture, with particular attention to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She studies how concepts such as ambition, gender, and moral transgression were discursively constructed to regulate authority, legitimate governance, and discipline challenges to social order. Her doctoral dissertation, Condemnation and Control: Ambition in Scotland, 1550–1625, reconstructed ambition as a political category rather than a moral failing, a diagnostic label applied to claims on power that had been marked as illegitimate, intensifying precisely during moments of political instability, religious transformation, and contested authority. Her work traces how these rhetorical formations shaped early modern political thought and how their underlying logics continue to inform modern institutional and informational regimes.

Central to her scholarship is an interest in information culture and epistemic systems: how knowledge is produced, classified, and circulated, and how these processes encode and reproduce power relations associated with colonization, patriarchy, and racialization. She approaches information not as neutral content, but as an historically contingent system shaped by institutional design, governance structures, and normative assumptions.

Methodologically, her work combines close historical analysis with computational approaches drawn from corpus linguistics and semantic modeling. Her doctoral project used Latent Semantic Analysis to map the moral field surrounding ambition across a corpus of approximately 225 Scots- and English-language texts, the same distributional logic that underlies modern large language models. She uses digital methods as interpretive tools to analyze large-scale patterns of meaning while remaining attentive to historical context, rhetoric, and power.

That methodological continuity is now central to her contemporary research. Her invited chapter, “The Rational Machine and the Feminized Interface: How Oppression Became the Epistemology of AI,” forthcoming in the De Gruyter Handbook of Feminist Digital Scholarship (eds. Anne Cong-Huyen and Kim Brillante Knight, 2027), argues that contemporary algorithmic systems do not invent new hierarchies; they inherit, formalize, and automate old ones. Her ongoing research examines the colonial logics embedded in AI design, the flattening of cultural memory and archival knowledge by computational systems, and the failure modes of AI safety architectures that misclassify critical, situated, or emotionally complex discourse as risk-adjacent. She is available for consultation and expert commentary on early modern Scottish and British political culture, gender and authority in historical perspective, and contemporary questions of AI governance, information culture, and algorithmic power, particularly where humanistic and historical expertise is needed to make sense of the systems shaping modern life.

Recent Publications

Edited Collections

Baer-Tsarfati, Lisa, Sierra Dye, and Mariah Hudec, eds. Networks and Networking in Scottish Studies: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Ewan. Guelph: Centre for Scottish Studies, 2024.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles & Essays

Baer-Tsarfati, Lisa. “Foreword: On Digital Accessibility and Open-Access Publishing.” In Networks and Networking in Scottish Studies: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Ewan, edited by Lisa Baer-Tsarfati, Sierra Dye, and Mariah Hudec. Guelph: Centre for Scottish Studies, 2024, https://books.lib.uoguelph.ca/networksandnetworking/front-matter/foreword-on-digital-accessibility-and-open-access-publication/.

Raeburn, Fraser, Lisa Baer-Tsarfati, and Viktoria Porter. “Out of the Ivory Tower, into the Digital World? Democratising Scholarly Exchange,” History 106, no. 171 (2022): 287–301, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13259.

Baer-Tsarfati, Lisa. “Gender, Authority, and Control: Male Invective and the Restriction of Female Ambition in Early  Modern Scotland and England, 1583–1616,” International Review of Scottish Studies 44 (2019): 35–56. https://doi.org/10.21083/irss.v44i0.5901.

Invited Manuscripts

“The Rational Machine and the Feminized Interface: How Oppression Became the Epistemology of AI.” In De Gruyter Handbook of Feminist Digital Scholarship: DS/DH at the Kitchen Table, edited by Anne Cong-Huyen and Kim Brillante Knight. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2027.

Conference Proceedings & Abstracts

Baer-Tsarfati, Lisa. “Democratizing Public History: The AskHistorians Digital Conference as a Model for Inclusive Academic Engagement.” In DH2024 Book of Abstracts, edited by Jajwalya Karajgikar,  Andrew Janco and Jessica Otis. Arlington, VA: ADHO Program Committee, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1376106.

Baer-Tsarfati, Lisa. “Word Embedding for the Historian: Employing LSI to Understand How Words Were

Historically Used.” CSDH-SCHN 2020 Building Community Online Conference Proceedings. CSDH-SCHN, 2020, https://doi.org/10.17613/m1fyx-9k433.

Other Publications

Baer-Tsarfati, Lisa. “The Marital Woes of Margaret Tosheoch: Mythologizing Marriage, Divorce, and Concubinage in Early Modern Perthshire.” The Centre for Scottish Culture Blog, 27 July 2020, https://t.co/nx8fMwpLGe?amp=1.

Media Coverage

BBC Radio Scotland "Time Travels" Podcast, Infinite Women Podcast

Social Media

Bluesky

Country Focus

Scotland, England

Expertise by Geography

British Isles

Expertise by Chronology

Medieval, Pre-17th century, 17th century, 18th century, Early Modern

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Computational, Gender, Politics, Public History, Religion, Women