David Bamman

Associate Professor
School of Information
University of California, Berkeley

Affiliated appointments: EECS, Linguistics, Computational Precision Health

Faculty, Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR); Senior Fellow, Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS)

bluesky: @dbamman.bsky.social
email: dbamman at berkeley.edu

Fall 2026 office hours: Wed. 10am-noon (312 SH).

CV

David Bamman is an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, where he works in the areas of natural language processing and cultural analytics, applying NLP and AI to empirical questions in the humanities and social sciences. His research focuses on improving the performance of computational methods for underserved domains like literature (including LitBank and BookNLP) and developing new empirical approaches for the study of literature, film and culture. Before Berkeley, he received his PhD in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and was a senior researcher at the Perseus Project of Tufts University. Bamman's work is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and an NSF CAREER award.

One of our major research areas at the moment is the computational analysis of film. See that page for an overview of our recent work, including measuring representation on screen (gender, race/ethnicity, animation), tracing the evolution of formal aspects like camera distance, and creating benchmarks to assess how well multimodal models understand film narrative.

I lead an amazing research group:

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