Roopika Risam and New Digital Worlds

Reframing History

In this episode, I spoke with Roopika Risam, Associate Professor of English and the Faculty Fellow for Digital Library Initiatives at Salem State University. Dr. Risam’s research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, digital humanities, and new media. Her book, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. She is co-editing two volumes: Intersectionality in Digital Humanities with Barbara Bordalejo for Arc Humanities Press and The Digital Black Atlantic with Kelly Baker Josephs for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press). Along with Carol Stabile, she is co-director of Reanimate, an intersectional feminist publishing collective recovering archival writing by women in media activism. Her scholarship has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, First Monday, Popular Communications, and College and Undergraduate Libraries, among others. In our conversation, we discussed the origins of her digital praxis and how her vision for digital humanities animate the projects she pursues and her persona as a public intellectual.