My goal is to contribute to research and teaching that helps shape responsible frameworks for emerging technologies before harmful practices become entrenched.
Introduction
Lisa Baer-Tsarfati's dissertation, Condemnation and Control: Ambition in Scotland, 1550–1625, was successfully defended on Wednesday, December 17, 2025. It examines ambition as an historically contingent moral and political concept, not a transhistorical psychological trait. It is an "intellectual and political history of ambition in early modern Scotland. Rather than treating ambition as an enduring personality trait, or, worse, a motivational virtue, the project reconstructs ambition as a historically specific category of illegitimate power."
Academic service
Dr. Baer-Tsarfati has served, and continues to serve, as a public historian. "My long-standing work with the AskHistorians project on Reddit has been central to shaping my approach as a scholar," she states. "In my role as a community moderator, I have led large-scale initiatives for this project including conferences, governance planning, and exploratory work toward scholarly publications. This work has deeply informed my thinking about accessibility, open access, scholarly infrastructure, and the responsibilities of public-facing digital history."
Lisa has several publications on her record, including work as co-editor of the 2024 Networks and Networking in Scottish Studies: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Ewan, published by Guelph's Centre for Scottish Studies, where Lisa also worked during her studies. Dr. Elizabeth Ewan, F. R. S. C. and now professor emerita from Guelph served as Lisa's co-supervisor along with Dr. Susannah Ferreira. Dr. Greta Kroeker, University of Waterloo, served as her third committee member. Another of Lisa's articles, "Gender, Authority, and Control: Male Invective and the Restriction of Female Ambition in Early Modern Scotland and England, 1583–1616," won the 2020 Tri-U PhD Essay prize.
Future plans
Dr. Baer-Tsarfati is currently seeking faculty or research positions in areas such as information technology and culture, AI and society, AI and education, emerging technologies, and data governance and ethics. Her training as an historian and humanist who has built and coded semantic models from scratch gives her a distinctive perspective: she can engage directly with technical systems while also anticipating their social, ethical, and institutional consequences.
PhD research
Drawing on sermons, moral treatises, proclamations, diplomatic correspondence, and legal records, Dr. Baer-Tsarfati explains on her website that she found that "ambition functioned as a diagnostic label: a way of identifying political overreach, explaining instability, and authorizing intervention. Condemnations of ambition intensified precisely when authority itself was uncertain: during the Scottish Reformation, royal minorities, factional conflict, and debates over sovereignty. In those moments, ambition explained how power went wrong. It marked certain claims to authority as unlawful, ungodly, or socially dangerous, while still preserving the possibility of rehabilitation rather than simple elimination. Ambition was less a sin to be purged than a problem to be managed."
Lisa's research trajectory illustrates how a PhD project can evolve over time. Initially, she began to study women’s ambition in early modern Scotland. The research evolved, however, "Into a broader intellectual history of ambition as a technology of governance that regulated authority, legitimacy, and dissent through moral language." As the project developed," she continues, "I began using digital humanities methods such as Latent Semantic Analysis1 (see definition and table below) and word embedding models to reconstruct ambition's semantic field from within historical discourse. These methods, which are foundational to contemporary generative AI, prompted me to think more broadly about information ethics, data governance, and how systems of knowledge production shape power both past and present."
The interdisciplinary path that Lisa followed in her project was strongly supported by the University of Guelph’s THINC Lab, which encouraged methodological experimentation, as well as by the digital humanities focus championed at the University of Waterloo.
1Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), "is a statistical technique designed to identify relationships between words based on their co-occurrence patterns across a corpus." ("Condemnation and Control: Ambition in Scotland, 1550–1625," p. 13.)
Latent Semantic Analysis of Ambition in Discourse Texts table from "Condemnation and Control: Ambition in Scotland, 1550–1625," Figure 1, p. 197. © Lisa Baer-Tsarfati.
Image from Wikipedia, of a pamphlet written by John Knox. It is an example of the documents analyzed by Lisa in her research.
