Jacob Polay

Historian of the early modern Atlantic world and its commodities and medicines, exploring the role large language models will play in historical practice.

PhD Student · Department of History · University of Saskatchewan

Saskatoon: Printed for the Author, 2026.

About

I am a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan, based in Saskatoon. My research sits where early modern history, the history of capitalism, the history of medicine, and AI methods meet. I build humanist-designed computational pipelines for reading the archive at scale, and I write critically about how AI products represent historical records.

My doctoral project follows medicinal commodities through the early modern Atlantic world, c. 1660–1815: colonial drugs and "simples" flowing into Britain, and manufactured medicines flowing back out to plantations, ships, and garrisons. I am supervised by Dr. Jim Clifford, Professor of History.

jacob.polay@usask.ca · ORCID · Bluesky · GitHub · CV (PDF)

Recent

  1. Fitting Machine to Page. AI and History Conference, American Historical Association, Baltimore.
  2. Not Just Farming: How an LLM Helped Me Study Saskatchewan’s Smallest Settlements. Active History.
  3. Can You Read Two Million Pages? An LLM Can Help.. Active History.
  4. Stop Choosing Tools. Start Building Them.. Active History.