Postdoctoral Researcher in AI, Digital Humanities, and Arabic Studies | Center for Arab Studies and Islamic Civilizations (CASIC)

The Postdoctoral Researcher in AI, Digital Humanities, and Arabic Studies will be based at CASIC and will contribute to the research agenda of CASIC by conducting advanced interdisciplinary research at the intersection of Arabic Studies, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Humanities. The role supports the Center’s strategic objectives in digital scholarship, Arabic language technologies, and cultural heritage research, and contributes to externally funded research projects, publications, and academic capacity building. The position is offered on a fixed-term basis for two years.

Job Responsibilities    

• Conduct independent and collaborative research in AI-driven approaches to Arabic texts, cultural heritage, or digital humanities projects aligned with CASIC’s research priorities.
• Contribute to the design, implementation, and analysis of digital humanities projects involving Arabic corpora, manuscript data, or born-digital materials.
• Apply computational methods (e.g. natural language processing, machine learning, corpus linguistics, data visualization) to Arabic-language research questions.
• Publish research findings in peer-reviewed journals and contribute to edited volumes, grant reports, or digital research outputs.
• Support the preparation of external grant proposals and research funding applications relevant to AI, Arabic studies, and digital heritage.
• Collaborate with AUS faculty members who are PIs in relevant interdisciplinary research initiatives.
• Assist in the development and delivery of workshops, training sessions, or seminars related to AI and digital humanities in Arabic studies.
• Mentor and assist, as appropriate and as directed, the research graduate students working on relevant projects.
• May teach one undergraduate course per semester (100-level) in the Department of Arabic and Translation Studies as part of the General Education Program, in coordination with departmental and program needs.

Qualifications and Skills Required

• PhD in Arabic Studies, Digital Humanities, Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, Computer Science (with humanities focus), or a closely related discipline, awarded by the time of appointment.
• Strong analytical and research skills with the ability to integrate humanities scholarship and computational methods.
• Excellent academic writing and communication skills in English; proficiency in Arabic required for research purposes.
• Ability to work independently, manage research timelines, and meet publication or project deadlines.
• Collaborative mindset and capacity to work across disciplinary boundaries.
• Ability to design and interpret quantitative and qualitative analytical workflows, combining computational outputs with humanities-based critical analysis.
• Familiarity with ethical research practices, data management, and reproducible research methods.
• Experience working with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for language analysis, with particular emphasis on Arabic language processing (e.g. tokenization, lemmatization, POS tagging, named entity recognition, topic modeling, sentiment or stance analysis).
• Familiarity with machine learning or deep learning models for language processing, including the use, evaluation, or fine-tuning of transformer-based language models (e.g. BERT-style or GPT-style architectures) for humanities or linguistic research questions.
• Proficiency in programming or scripting languages commonly used in digital humanities (e.g. Python, R), including the use of relevant libraries for text analysis and NLP (such as spaCy, NLTK, etc).
• Experience in corpus creation, annotation, and management, including text cleaning, normalization, metadata design, and structured data formats (e.g. CSV, JSON, XML/TEI where relevant).
• Demonstrated research experience in digital humanities, computational linguistics, AI applications in the humanities, or closely related fields.
• Proven ability to conduct independent scholarly research and collaborate within interdisciplinary research teams.
• Track record (or strong potential) of peer-reviewed publications relevant to Arabic studies and/or digital humanities.

Preferred Qualifications and Skills

• Research experience working with Arabic-language data, corpora, or digital heritage materials.
• Experience in externally funded research projects or international research collaborations.

How to Apply

• Interested applicants should fill out the form.
• Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. The anticipated start date is September 2026.
• AUS alumni are encouraged to apply. Applicants who do not meet specified requirements will not be shortlisted. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.
• AUS is an equal opportunity employer. We adhere to a policy of making employment decisions without regard to race, color, age, gender, religion, national origin, disability or marital status. Opportunities for employment are based solely upon one’s qualifications.