Post-doctoral Research Associate in Latin linguistics
About us:
King’s College London is home to the world’s largest Department of Digital Humanities, located within the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. We are internationally recognised for our interdisciplinary research and teaching at the intersection of the humanities and computational methods. The successful candidate will join the Computational Humanities research group, a vibrant and collaborative team dedicated to advancing data-driven approaches to historical, linguistic, and cultural research. This post is part of the 5-year project Computational Corpus Annotation for Quantitative Analysis of Latin Lexical Semantics (COALA), successfully evaluated by the ERC as a Consolidator Grant and funded by UKRI, led by Dr Barbara McGillivray.
About the role:
We are seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Latin Linguistics to co-lead the curated stream of the COALA project.
This role is an exciting opportunity to contribute to a pioneering project at the intersection of natural language processing, historical linguistics, and computational humanities.
The postholder will co-lead the curated stream of the project, which involves designing a large corpus of Latin texts, curating it (correction of pre-processed data and corpus metadata), curation of Latin sense inventories from lexicographic sources, validating and correcting automatic word sense annotations, coordinating a team of annotators working on sense annotation, and conducting case studies on Latin lexical semantics. You will work closely with computational linguists to integrate linguistic insights into computational models and help build open-source tools and resources that will support future research in historical semantics and NLP.
You will be responsible to the Principal Investigator and will collaborate with a team of postdoctoral researchers and external advisors across linguistics, NLP, and classical studies.
This is a full-time post (35 hours per week) based in London at the KCL Strand Campus, and you will be offered a fixed-term contract until 31st January 2030
Research staff at King’s are entitled to at least 10 days per year (pro-rata) for professional development. This entitlement, from the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, applies to Postdocs, Research Assistants, Research and Teaching Technicians, Teaching Fellows and AEP equivalent up to and including grade 7. Visit the Centre for Research Staff Development for more information.
About you:
To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:
Essential criteria
- PhD awarded in Latin Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Digital Humanities or a closely related field or PhD near completion in Latin Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Digital Humanities, or a closely related field*
- Experience working with Latin corpora and/or dictionaries
- Excellent proficiency in written Latin
- Strong publication record comparable with career stage
- Ability to work collaboratively in interdisciplinary teams
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Desirable criteria
- Knowledge of Medieval Latin or Neo-Latin
- Familiarity with corpus annotation standards and tools
- Familiarity with computational semantics methods
* Please note that this is a PhD level role but candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award of their PhDs will be considered. Should the successful candidate be awaiting the award of their PhD, the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spinal point 30 with the title of Research Assistant until confirmation of the award of the PhD has been received. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6, spine point 31.
Interviews are due to be held on 24 July 2026.
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