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Dr. Lisa Baer-Tsarfati is an intellectual historian and digital humanist whose research 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 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 a 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. She uses digital methods as interpretive tools to analyze large-scale patterns of meaning while remaining attentive to historical context, rhetoric, and power. This approach allows her to connect early modern discursive practices to contemporary debates about information governance and the ethics of computational systems.

Her research and teaching emphasize critical historical inquiry, methodological transparency, and interdisciplinary engagement. More broadly, her work asks how systems of knowledge are constructed, how they sustain inequality, and how historically grounded analysis can inform more equitable ways of organizing information and authority.

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