Stephen Bothwell

Ph.D. Candidate

University of Notre Dame

Notice: I am currently looking into positions after my Ph.D.. I am primarily interested in postdocs and/or positions in university library spaces. If you have an opportunity that you'd like to discuss with me, please feel free to reach out to me!

---

Salve! My name is Stephen Bothwell, and I am a researcher whose interests are at the intersection of both the ancient and the modern. In particular, I study the application of techniques in natural language processing (NLP) to ancient languages. I am invested in unifying linguistic ideas and modern computational (e.g., neural) techniques.

Currently, I am a sixth-year graduate student in the NLP Group at the University of Notre Dame. I am advised by Dr. David Chiang, and I work on projects pertaining to language at various granularities. One line of work concerns the derivation of sound laws in historical linguistics, striving to add interpretability to derived systems of ancestor and descendant language forms through the determination of rules. Another line of work explores stylistics, attempting to computationally detect and analyze rhetorical devices like rhythm and parallelism.

Aside from research, I also have served as a senior pedagogy fellow for the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. Through the NFCDS, I have aided AI literacy through teaching both about the fundamentals of neural networks as well as about more complex topics (e.g., using specific architectures in PyTorch). Please see the "Teaching" tab for more details on the workshops I produced through the NFCDS' fellowship program.

Education

• Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
  University of Notre Dame
  Ongoing (Projected Conclusion: Summer 2026)

• M.S., Computer Science and Engineering
  University of Notre Dame
  2025

• B.A., Computer Science (Minor in Mathematics)
  Xavier University
  2019

• Honors B.A., Classics & Philosophy (Minor in Philosophy)
  Xavier University
  2019