Jae-Yon Lee, Associate Professor in the School of Liberal Arts at UNIST, has been elected President-Elect of the Constituent Organizations Board (COB) of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). He will serve alongside the current president for the coming year before assuming the presidency in 2027.

The COB is the principal governing body of ADHO, which brings together digital humanities organizations representing regions and communities language around the world. As president, Professor Lee will help set the alliance's long-term direction, coordinate among its member organizations, and lead discussions on policy and international collaboration.

Professor Lee has represented the Korean Association for Digital Humanities (KADH) on the COB since 2023, when KADH became an official constituent organization of ADHO. He currently serves as KADH vice president and chair of its research planning committee, connecting scholarship in Korea with the wider international digital humanities community.

Korea's growing role in ADHO was also evident this summer, when KADH hosted Digital Humanities 2026 (DH2026), the alliance's 36th annual international conference, from July 27 to 31 at the Daejeon Convention Center. Under the theme “Engagement,” researchers from around the world presented nearly 490 studies spanning multilingual AI research, humanities research using smaller datasets, and data sovereignty and cultural memory.

For the first time at an ADHO annual conference, real-time AI translation was used across the academic program to support presentations in English, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, broadening participation across linguistic communities.

“I hope to contribute to a global digital humanities community that better reflects the distinct cultures and languages of different regions, moving beyond a field historically centered in Europe and the United States,” Professor Lee said. “Drawing on my research and teaching at UNIST, I also hope to bring the humanities and engineering into closer conversation and broaden the intellectual possibilities available to the next generation of researchers.”

Professor Lee studied Korean literature at Yonsei University, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago and has taught and conducted research at UNIST since 2012. His research spans 20th-century Korean fiction and criticism, colonial-era periodicals, the sociology of literature, and digital humanities.

His work applies computational methods—including network and corpus analysis, word embeddings, and computational stylistics—to the study of Korean literature. More recently, he has expanded his research to narrative generation using AI language models and interdisciplinary education connecting literature and engineering.