Curriculum Vitae

Education

Experience

Publications

1. Adam Hanzel and Kiril Avramov. Ladders of Escalation: Flexible Modeling in Comparative Cases of State-Sponsored Targeted Killings. SpringerBriefs in International Relations. Springer Nature, 2026. ISBN 978-3-032-21610-6.
2. Adam Hanzel. “Book Review: Ball, Simon, Death to Order: A History of Modern Assassination, New Haven: Yale University Press, 466 pp.” Journal of European and American Intelligence Studies 8.2 (Dec. 2025). ISSN 2585-383X.
3. Kiril Avramov et al. “Crossing the ‘Red Lines’: Target Assessment and Typology of the Post-Soviet Targeted Retributions.” In Killing in the Name of the State. Lynne Rienner, 2025. ISBN 979-8-89616-357-2.
4. Mary Neuburger and Adam Hanzel. “Mediums, Media, and Mediated ‘Post’-Truth: Baba Vanga in the Russian Imagination.” Comparative Studies in Society and History (Oct. 2024), pp. 1–26. doi:10.1017/S0010417524000264.

Works in production

1. Adam Hanzel et al. “Alternative AI and Digital Authoritarianism: Analyzing AI as a Cultural Object.” (2026)
2. Adam Hanzel. “Legislating Security: Computational Mapping of Ukraine's Counterterrorism Legislation 1991–2026.” (2026)
3. Adam Hanzel and Kiril Avramov. “‘Russia Has a Different Path’: Yarovaya and the Russian Security Council Redefining and Normalizing Terrorism in Eurasia.” (2025)

Languages and skillsets

Awards, scholarships, academic recognitions

• 2023–2025LBJ Graduate Student Fellowship
• Spring 2023Affordable Education Champion, UT Libraries
• Summer 2021Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship
• Aug 2012Electrical Engineering Scholarship

Talks, papers, conference contributions

• 1–3 Jun 2026Knowledge Graphs and AI-assisted “Forensic Reading” in Bulgarian Spy Fiction
  IAFIE Global Conference, University of North Georgia, USA
• 10 Apr 2026Counterterrorism in EU Strategic Relations with Eurasia
  ICCT, The Hague, Netherlands
• 27 Nov 2025Digital Humanities Methods in the Social Sciences
  PUC Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
• 9 Sep 2025“Ladders of Escalation”: Flexible Modeling in Comparative Cases
  IAFIE Europe Annual Conference, Madrid, Spain
• 13 Feb 2024Russian Orthodoxy as Political Tool of Putin
  Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, University of Texas at Austin
• 15 Dec 2023The Logic of Vengeance: Patterns of Escalation of the Post-Soviet Targeted Killings
  EUACADEMY conference, co-funded by Erasmus+
• 1 Dec 2023Indigenous Peoples Misrepresentation Heuristic
  University of Texas at Austin
• 12 Oct 2023Raskol Ripples: Schism into the 19th Century
  University of Texas at Austin
• 12 Oct 2023The Logic of Vengeance
  Hybrid Warfare Security Conference, University of South Wales
• 17 May 2023Crossing the “Red Lines”
  State-Sponsored Assassinations in International Politics, History, and Law, Swansea University
• 24 Apr 2023Mediums, Media, and Mediated “Post”-Truth: Baba Vanga in the Russian Imagination
  UT CREEES one-day workshop, University of Texas at Austin

Developed tools

• Comparative Legislative Knowledge Graph — Python and Neo4j pipeline that scrapes, sections and ingests national legal corpora from four post-Communist states into a single citation graph.
• Cross-Lingual Legal Citation Extractor and Resolver — recovers citation networks from legal corpora published without hyperlinks, resolving references by act title and article through a corpus-derived index. Handles Bulgarian definite-article morphology and unpublished parent codes, reaching resolution parity with corpora that ship machine-readable references.
• Multi-Space Semantic Classifier for Legal Text — scores legislation against seed-law centroids in three independent embedding spaces (OpenAI text-embedding-3-large, BGE-M3, Qwen3-8B) as a replication design, using bounded-chunk scoring and a Wilson score-interval lower bound to remove document-length bias.
• Legislation Research Dashboard — read-only Python web interface for cross-jurisdiction legal search over full document text, provisions and legislative-history records, with morphology-aware query expansion, matched-term timelines and an interactive directed citation-network graph. Demo.
• Legislative Document Extraction and OCR Pipeline — retrieves and text-extracts parliamentary bill attachments across PDF, Word, Excel, RTF and legacy encodings, with a Tesseract OCR fallback for scanned documents. Recovered 4.3 billion characters from 315,000 files at 98% extraction.
• BERTopic Topic Modelling and Legislation Graphing — transformer topic model grouping legislation by semantic content and metadata.
• Telegram Social Media Scraper and Archiver — command-line tool on Telegram's API that walks selected channels and archives message metadata, text and media to an online database.
• Static and Dynamic Web Scraper — command-line tool for static and JavaScript-rendered sites, storing textual data and metadata.
• ACH Analysis in Google Sheets — port of an existing ACH algorithm and further statistical methods to Google Apps Script for version-controlled, multi-user analysis of competing hypotheses.
• Zotero Translator for Cyrillic Transliteration — Zotero add-on that cites transliterated titles and end-of-citation sources for drafting.
• Fine-Tuned GPT-2 Text Generator for Disinformation — GPT-2 trained on Sergey Lavrov's Ministry of Foreign Affairs speeches to produce synthetic addresses, evaluated by disinformation experts.