Rijul Jain

I am a literary scholar and computer scientist interested in how representations of historical material condition our experience of, and the space of possible inquiry about, the past. To this end, I work on aesthetic theory and the philosophy of history in Victorian representations of the Italian Renaissance as well as reimagining search and discovery in digital collections for humanities scholars, libraries, and museums.

I’m a PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington advised by Benjamin Charles Germain Lee and R. Benjamin Shapiro. In 2026-27, I’ll take up an MPhil in English Studies at the University of Cambridge on a 2026 Gates Cambridge Scholarship. My doctoral research is supported by a 2025 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

I completed my BA, summa cum laude, in English and Computer Science, with Highest Honors in English, at Williams College. I was a visiting student at the University of Oxford for the 2023-24 academic year on the Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford.

I’m a 2026 summer intern at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University designing human-AI interaction affordances to expand the space of possible inquiry in digital archival search and discovery. I have designed and conducted a study of expert users of proof-oriented languages at Microsoft Research, developed methods to generate domain-specific programs with large language models to democratize diagram authoring at Carnegie Mellon University, and implemented a programming language to safely express program semantics for OS platform- and version-agnostic execution at Williams.

I’m a professionally trained stage actor and a classical pianist.