William J. Turkel

- Professor

image of William J. Turkel
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2004
Email: wturkel@uwo.ca
Office: Lawson Hall 2267
Office Hours via Zoom: By Appointment

 

Research and Teaching

Professor Turkel is a Professor of History at The University of Western Ontario in Canada and a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (2018-26). His research involves computational history, big history, and science and technology studies (STS) with a focus on methods. He is also one of the first cohort of Western's new Generative AI Teaching Fellows (2025-27), a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy and the recipient of the Western Award for Innovations in Technology-Enhanced Teaching (2021).


There is more information about his work on his personal webpage (williamjturkel.net). 

 

Selected Recent Publications


  • W. J. Turkel. Global 21st Century History: Themes and Methods. Monograph manuscript under rewiew, 2025.
  • Robert M. Corless, Arthur C. Norman, Tomas Recio, W. J. Turkel and Stephen Watt. “Symbolic Mathematical Computation 1965–1975: The View from a Half-Century Perspective.” [Preprint] 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16457 
  • Tim Hitchcock and W. J. Turkel. “Making Sense of the Emergence of Manslaughter in British Criminal Justice.” Digital Humanities Quarterly special issue on “Data Driven Inquiries into the Past.” Forthcoming, 2025.
  • W. J. Turkel. “GenAI Challenge Series: AI and Disinformation,” UWO Centre for Teaching and Learning. Online. July 2025.
  • W. J. Turkel. “Writing Nonfiction in the Company of Artificial Intelligences,” Digital Humanities Summer Institute. Montreal, QC. June 2025.
  • W. J. Turkel. “Incorporating the Sensemaking Loop from Intelligence Analysis into Bespoke Tools for Digital History.” Invited for Historia y Grafía special issue on “Historia digital: en la frontera del sur y norte global.” No. 64 (December 2024):23-54.
  • W. J. Turkel. “Ourorack: Altered States of Consciousness and Auto-Experimentation with Electronic Sound.” Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People, edited by Ezra J. Teboul, Andreas Kitzmann, and Einar Engström. Routledge, 2024.
  • Ruramisai Charumbira and W. J. Turkel. “A Minimal Computing Approach to Southern African Language Resources.” Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa. Vol 5, No. 1: Digital Humanities for Inclusion, 2024.
  • W. J. Turkel. “A Complex Adaptive Systems Approach to a Large Historical Document Collection.” Western Complex Systems Conference. University of Western Ontario. London, ON. March 2024.
  • W. J. Turkel. Digital Research Methods with Mathematica, 2nd rev. ed. 2020.