Roopika Risam


Roopika Risam is an associate professor of Secondary and Higher Education and English and the Faculty Fellow of Digital Library Initiatives at Salem State University. She is a scholar of digital and postcolonial humanities.

Work

Risam's work focuses on the intersections between postcolonial humanities and ethnic studies. She is the co-director of Reanimate, "an intersectional publishing collective that produces multimodal editions of archival writings by activist women in media." She has published articles in First Monday and Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. She has also included writing in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies and the Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media.
In 2018, Risam was awarded the inaugural Massachusetts Library Association's Civil Liberties Champion Award for her work on ", a digital humanities project documenting the sites of immigrant detention centers in the United States. She also released her first book, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, from Northwestern University Press in 2018.

Education

In 2003, Risam earned her B.A. in Creative Writing and South Asian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her M.A., with distinction, from Georgetown University in 2007 and her Ph.D. in English from Emory University in 2013.