Roopika Risam is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. Formerly, Risam was Chair of Secondary and Higher Education and Associate Professor of Education and English at Salem State University. Her research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, and digital humanities.
Risam’s work building humanities knowledge infrastructures has been supported by over $3.6 million in grants from the Andrew W. 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, South Asian Digital Humanities, and The Digital Black Atlantic. Her next academic book traces a new history of public humanities through the emergence of ethnic studies, is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press.
Risam is Principal Investigator of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon). 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.
Her first trade book will explore data and empire.
