Jiajun ZouGraduate Student
Zou has a diverse range of experiences both within and outside academia, emphasizing critical thinking and creativity. His most recent position is that of a student intern analyst with the Defense Capabilities and Management Team at the Government Accountability Office (GAO). In this role, he has been focused on researching and writing reports for Congress to enhance the military justice system. In his teaching at Emory, Zou advocates for unconventional, interactive, and digitally empowered methods. He has employed innovative approaches like face-swap technology for students to role-play as historical figures, and has also used audiobooks, VR museums, and other tools to inspire interest in public humanities.Personally, Zou is interested in creating tools to help academics maximize their efficiency in both research and teaching. This includes utilizing large language models to process vast amounts of sources and readings, developing model-driven summarization tools, employing semantic search for historical sources, creating highly accurate optical character recognition for ancient Chinese texts, using sentence similarity to map bibliographical connections, and integrating artificial intelligence to interact with maps, data, and historical sources.Currently, Zou is projected to finish his dissertation in May 2024 and is actively collaborating with colleagues in China and institutions in the U.S. He aims to bridge research with teaching and technology with humanities.
Education
- BA in History, SUNY Binghamton, 2017
Research Interests
Late Imperial China
Civil Service Examination
Digital Humanities
Dissertation Topic
"Rejuvenating the Central Country: Examining Ming Dynasty Examination Records and the Ideological Construction of Sino-Foreign Doctrines, 1368-1644"
