About

Roopika Risam is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, where she is part of the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster.

Formerly, Risam was Chair of Secondary and Higher Education and Associate Professor of Education and English at Salem State University. There, she also served as the Faculty Fellow for Digital Library Initiatives, Co-Director of the Viking OER and Textbook Affordability Initiative, Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies, and Coordinator of the Combined B.A./M.Ed. in English Education.

Her research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, and digital humanities.

Risam’s work has been supported by over $4.3 million in grants from funders including the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute for Museum and Library Services, Mass Humanities, and the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.

Her first monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. She is the co-editor of Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (Arc Humanities/Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and South Asian Digital Humanities: Postcolonial Mediations Across Technology’s Cultural Canon (Routledge, 2020). Risam’s latest co-edited collection The Digital Black Atlantic in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press) was published in 2021. Her current book project, “Insurgent Academics: A Radical Account of Public Humanities,” which traces a new history of public humanities through the emergence of ethnic studies, is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press.

Her scholarship has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, First Monday, Popular Communications, College and Undergraduate Libraries, and Native American and Indigenous Studies, among other journals and volumes.

Risam is Principal Investigator of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon), which brings together faculty who work at the intersections of ethnic studies and digital humanities. She is currently developing The Global Du Bois, a data visualization project on W.E.B. Du Bois. She also co-directs Reanimate, an intersectional feminist publishing collective that recovers archival writing by women in media industries, and co-hosts Rocking the Academy, a podcast featuring conversations with the very best truth tellers, who are formulating a new vision of higher education. She is also a founding member of The Data-Sitters Club and co-editor of Reviews in Digital Humanities.

Currently co-president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and co-chair of the DH Unbound 2022 conference, Risam previously served as a founding board member of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH) and co-chair of the ACH 2019 and ACH 2021 conferences. She is also co-founder of the New England Equity and Engagement Consortium, a group of 2- and 4-year public and private higher education institutions and community organizations working together to advance anti-racist community-engaged teaching and research within New England. Risam also received the Massachusetts Library Association’s inaugural Civil Liberties Champion Award for her work promoting equity and justice in the digital cultural record.

Risam is represented by Emma Bal at the Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency. She is writing her first trade book, which explores the intertwined histories of data and empire.

Her CV is available here.