Roopika Risam is Professor of Film and Media Studies Department and the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth College. Her research explores how histories of race, empire, and technology shape the modern world. Risam joined the Dartmouth faculty in 2022 and serves as the Chair of Film and Media Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature.
Risam is internationally known for her research and initiative-building in digital humanites. 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.
Risam's latest book, Data Empire (HarperCollins US and Torva/Penguin UK, 2026) received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was a 2026 NPR Summer Reading Pick. Her first book, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP, 2019) has been taught in more than 150 courses at universities around the world and is a fixture on digital humanities syllabi. Risam is currently writing Undisciplined Digital Humanties: Designing for the World We Want for Bloomsbury with Jacqueline Wernimont. 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 also 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 served as director of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, which provided professional development for teaching at the intersections of digital humanities and ethnic studies. She also co-founded 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. She previously served as president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities with Quinn Dombrowski and co-PI of Landback Universities. Learn more at roopikarisam.com.