Bio – Roopika Risam

For more than you could possibly want to know, download my CV!

Career Highlights

Over $4.3 million in federal, state, and foundation grants
Book: New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (2019) taught in courses at more than 100 universities around the world
Collections: Anti-Racist Community Engagement (2023), The Digital Black Atlantic (2021), South Asian Digital Humanities (2020), and Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (2019)
Project: Torn Apart/Separados, a data visualization project that helped social workers and lawyers locate children separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border, received significant media attention including in Wired Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Fast Company, and is featured in Borderland (2024), a documentary on immigration activists in the U.S.
More than 50 articles and five special issues on digital humanities, media studies, community engagement, and higher education
Over 200 invited keynotes and talks at universities, libraries, museums, archives, and community organizations across the world
Founder of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, co-founder of the New England Equity and Engagement Consortium, and founding editor of Reviews in Digital Humanities with Jennifer Guiliano
President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the U.S. digital humanities organization, with Quinn Dombrowski (2022-2024)
Nine years teaching at a regional public university with leadership roles, including department chair and program director (2013-2022)
2023 International Association for Research in Service Learning and Community Engagement Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award

Short Bio

Roopika Risam is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth. Her research focuses on data histories, ethics, and practices at intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, digital humanities, and critical university studies. Risam is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, and co-editor of multiple volumes, most recently Anti-Racist Community Engagement (2023) and The Digital Black Atlantic (2021). She is the director of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, founding co-editor of Reviews in Digital Humanities, co-PI of Landback Universities, and co-president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. Risam is finishing her second book, Insurgent Academics: A Radical Account of Public Humanities (Johns Hopkins University Press), and she is working on a trade book on data and empire. She recently received the 2023 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award from the International Association for Research in Service Learning and Community Engagement. To learn more, please visit http://roopikarisam.com.

Extended Bio

Roopika Risam is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement, in the Film and Media Studies Department and the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on data histories, ethics, and practices at intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, digital humanities, and critical university studies. Prior to joining Dartmouth in 2022, she spent nine years at Salem State University, where she was a tenured professor, department chair, and program chair in the English and Secondary and Higher Education Departments.

Risam is internationally known for her research and initiative-building. Her work has been supported by over $4.3 million in grants from funders including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. Risam received the inaugural Massachusetts Library Association Civil Liberties Champion Award (2018) for her work promoting equity and justice in the digital cultural record and the 2023 International Association for Research in Service Learning and Community Engagement Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award for her work on anti-racist community engagement.

Her first book, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP, 2019) has been taught in more than 100 courses at universities around the world and is a fixture on digital humanities syllabi. Risam is currently finishing her second book, Insurgent Academics: A Radical Account of Public Humanities (Johns Hopkins UP), which traces a new history of public humanities and university-community engagement through the unsung work of Black, Brown, and Indigenous scholars who have been transforming universities from the moment they were allowed in, over a century ago. She is also writing her first trade book on the relationship between data and empire. Risam is represented by Emma Bal at the Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency.

Deeply committed to facilitating conversations and creating space for other scholars, past and present, to share their research, Risam has co-edited four collections: Anti-Racist Community Engagement (2023), The Digital Black Atlantic (2021), South Asian Digital Humanities (2020), and Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (2019). She has edited many special issues on topics such as minimal computing, gender and digital labor, and digital humanities pedagogy in times of crisis. With Carol Stabile, she runs Reanimate, an intersectional feminist publishing collective that creates open-access digital editions by writing of women in media industries. Reanimate has published Fredi Washington: A Reader in Black Feminist Media Criticism, The Ada Journal Reader, and The Ghost Reader Digital Companion. Risam is especially proud to have collaborated with Jennifer Guiliano to found Reviews in Digital Humanities, a journal dedicated to peer reviewing digital scholarship that fills the gap in evaluation for research outputs in digital form.

Risam’s own work also takes digital forms. Her best known project is Torn Apart/Separados, a series of data visualizations that helped social workers and lawyers locate children separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. The project team received significant media attention including in Wired Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Fast Company, and is featured in Borderland (2024), a documentary on immigration activists in the U.S. Along with a group of friends, Risam runs the award-winning Data-Sitters Club project, which explores computational textual analysis with a corpus of Ann M. Martin’s tween Baby-Sitters Club books from the 1990s. With Kelly Baker Josephs, Risam runs Keywords for Caribbean Studies. Her earlier projects include The Harlem Shadows Project, a TEI digital edition of Claude McKay’s poetry; the Rocking the Academy podcast; and Social Justice and the Digital Humanities. Risam’s in-progress work through the Digital Ethnic Futures Lab, her lab at Dartmouth, includes text mining university responses to the U.S. Supreme Court decision on affirmative action; The Pan-African Data Project, which collects and visualizes data from the Pan-Africanist movement during the first half of the 20th century; and The Global Du Bois, which tells data stories about the life of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Among her experiences with infrastructure-building, leadership, and service, Risam is the director of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, which provides professional development for teaching at the intersections of digital humanities and ethnic studies. She is also co-founder of the New England Equity and Engagement Consortium, which advances anti-racist community-engaged teaching, research, and practices within and across New England and beyond. Risam is a co-editor of the Text Technologies series at Stanford University Press, with Elaine Treharne and Ruth Ahnert, and serves as Higher Education Editor at Public Books. She is also president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities with Quinn Dombrowski and co-PI of Landback Universities.

When she is not doing all of the above, Roopsi (as she is really known) can be found at the barn, riding Dandelion (Dani for short), a horse friend she does not own but loves nonetheless.