Jo Guldi is a historian, data scientist, and Professor of Data and Decision Sciences at Emory University, where she co-directs the Center for the Future of Trust. Her work sits at the intersection of historical analysis, artificial intelligence, and public reasoning, with a focus on how societies build — and rebuild — the foundations of trust in the age of data abundance and AI-mediated communication. 

Guldi’s research advances hybrid scholarship that joins deep historical inquiry with cutting-edge computational methods. Across her projects, she develops tools that help citizens, scholars, and institutions understand how narratives evolve, how dissent and consensus form, and how evidence can be reliably assessed in an era of accelerating information complexity. 

She leads several major initiatives, including the Dissentometer, an AI benchmarking project that measures patterns of dissent and consensus across historical and digital corpora; Democracy Viewer, a no-code platform that empowers users to analyze long-term change in political speech; and Text Mining the Documentation of Climate Change, which applies natural language processing to map shifting narratives about the environment, responsibility, and policy over time. Her research portfolio is united by a commitment to transparency, equitable representation in global history, and the development of AI systems that strengthen — rather than undermine — democratic deliberation. 

Before joining Emory, Guldi was a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and a faculty member in the History Department at Brown University. She is the author of award-winning books including The Long Land War, a sweeping account of land reform movements and the politics of property, and The History Manifesto, a call to re-center long-term thinking and evidence-driven public reasoning in academic and civic life. Her scholarly articles and collaborative research appear in leading journals across the humanities, social sciences, and computational fields. 

Guldi’s work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Papers of the National Academy of Sciences, the BBC, CBC, The Dig, Novara Media, and other major international outlets. She regularly collaborates with computer scientists, climate scientists, social theorists, and global historians, and she advises institutions developing trustworthy AI and evidence infrastructures. 

Her current research brings together historical method, large language models, and democratic theory to imagine new systems of public reasoning that are scalable, accountable, and globally inclusive. At the Center for the Future of Trust, she champions interdisciplinary innovation and supports a community of scholars and civic partners working to create technologies and narratives that strengthen trust in facts, institutions, and each other.