• Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards, 2024-25

Prof. Javier Cha is a digital historian and medievalist who uses technology to explore the East Asian world a millennium ago and also aims to prepare the historical profession for an era of data abundance and automation. His research spans the translation of primary sources in classical Chinese, machine-assisted historical methods, and experimental projects that address the challenges posed by big data and artificial intelligence in the humanities.

Cha has secured over HK$16 million (US$2 million) in competitive grants and fellowships from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Korea Foundation, the University of Hong Kong, Seoul National University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Most recently, he has been selected as one of the inaugural recipients of the Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award of up to HK$5.3 million (US$680,000) for the “Playing Heaven” project, which aims to leverage transformer-based machine learning to develop sound computational methodologies for the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Neo-Confucianism.

He currently serves on the editorial boards of several leading digital humanities journals, including Journal of Cultural Analytics, Computational Humanities Research, and the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. In July 2025, he delivered the opening keynote at the DH2025 international conference in Lisbon, Portugal, organized by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.

Prior to joining the University of Hong Kong, he was a founding member of the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities and taught at the interdisciplinary College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He places strong emphasis on sustained mentorship and maintains long-term connections with students and advisees. His former students and lab members have gone on to pursue postgraduate studies at institutions including Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Columbia, USC, and LSE and led successful professional and executive careers at Google, Microsoft, Figma, and other major firms. Several former students and advisees have also founded impactful startup companies and received early-career recognition, including placement on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list.

Cha provides MPhil and PhD students with formal training in the canonical digital humanities literature and the sound application of computational methods in humanities research, with an emphasis that technical proficiency and interpretive rigour must develop together. Students are expected not only to conduct research in digital environments effectively but also to understand the epistemological and ethical questions that our reliance on technology raises.

In 2025, Cha launched Nabi X, a modular and responsible AI-assisted learning platform developed by his BDSL team with support from HKU’s Teaching Development Grant and Teaching Development and Language Enhancement Grant. Nabi X seeks to demystify artificial intelligence by allowing students to work directly with curated datasets, word embeddings, and knowledge graphs instead of treating AI as a black box.

Cha is the recipient of the Faculty of Arts’ Teaching Excellence Award 2024–25 in the Teaching Innovation in E-learning category.