Andrew Patrick Nelson

My research explores how perceptions, categories, and values surrounding language inform language ideology, and the ways in which language ideology in turn transforms use of language. My work brings together methods in semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and computational linguistics in analyzing texts about language written in late 19th and early 20th centuries Japan, while drawing comparisons with coeval sources in French, German, and English.

I was a 2021-22 Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow, and 2022-23 Senior Graduate Research Fellow with Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. My DH research incorporates methods from natural language processing to examine the occurrence, context, and semantic instability of political neologisms in Japanese diaspora newspapers.

Prior to joining the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford, I completed a Master’s degree in East Asian Regional Studies at Columbia University. My thesis contextualized representations of foreigners and foreign places in Japanese junior high school textbooks within the broader history of internationalization in the public school system.