Explaining Gendered Language Through Embedding Approximation: How “Stupid” Became a Man’s Word
Social Forces, 2026
About Me
I am Yutong (Max) Zhu, a Sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, where I work at the Knowledge Lab. I am advised by James Evans, John Levi Martin, and Bernard Koch. My work spans computational narratology, AI auditing, stratification, science of science, and opinion measurement using large language models. For more information, please refer to my CV.
Research Interests
- Sociology of Culture: language, word embedding, cultural cognition, identity, ideology
- Computational Social Science: mechanistic interpretability, science of science, stratification, social simulation
Selected Publications
Narrative Flattening: How Post-Training Compresses Thematic, Affective, and Stylistic Variation in LLM Fiction
EMNLP 2027
Spoiler Alert: Narrative Forecasting as a Metric for Tension in LLM Storytelling
COLM 2026*equal contribution
Trajectory
University of Chicago
Ph.D., Sociology
2025–
University of Chicago
M.A., Computational Social Science
2023–25
Stellar Cyber
Data Engineer · San Jose, CA
2022–23
Carnegie Mellon University
B.S., Computer Science; Additional Major in History
2022
Honors
- [Sep. 2023 – Jun. 2025] Awarded University Scholar Full‐Tuition Scholarship from the University of Chicago.
- [May 2022] Received the Ludwig Schaefer Award for Outstanding Achievement in History at Carnegie Mellon University.
Friends
Check out my friends: Jiayi Yuan and Hang Yin