Dr. Risam's research focuses on data histories, ethics, and practices at intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, digital humanities, and critical university studies. Her work has been supported by over $4.3 million in federal, state, and foundation grants, from funders including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. Risam received the 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 over 100 courses at universities worldwide 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 university-community engagement through the unsung work of Black, Brown, and Indigenous scholars. 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.
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.
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 Baby-Sitters Club books from the 1990s. With Kelly Baker Josephs, Risam runs Keywords for Caribbean Studies. Earlier projects include The Harlem Shadows Project, a 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 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.
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 co-founder of the New England Equity and Engagement Consortium, which advances anti-racist community-engaged research in New England and beyond. Risam is a co-editor of the Text Technologies series at Stanford UP, with Elaine Treharne and Ruth Ahnert, and 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.
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.
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.