Get to know our upcoming speakers!

22 February 2018

Authors

Risam and Morrison on post-colonial theory, feminist media studies, and digital humanities The CDH is very excited to announce two guest lecturers in early March. On March 5, Roopika Risam (Salem State) will talk about Recovering the Global Dimensions of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Career, and on March 7, Aimée Morrison (University of Waterloo) will give a lecture on Social Justice Selfies: Hasthag Counter Narratives and Activist Counter Publics. On March 6, Professors Risam and Morrison will jointly teach a workshop, Digital Humanities in Translation: Communicating Your Scholarship to Multiple Publics, on how to effectively communicate, talk and write about academic work and interdisciplinary scholarship in the various contexts and virtual venues made possible by the Digital Humanities.

Risam and Morrison on post-colonial theory, feminist media studies, and digital humanities

The CDH is very excited to announce two guest lecturers in early March. On March 5, Roopika Risam (Salem State) will talk about Recovering the Global Dimensions of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Career, and on March 7, Aimée Morrison (University of Waterloo) will give a lecture on Social Justice Selfies: Hasthag Counter Narratives and Activist Counter Publics. On March 6, Professors Risam and Morrison will jointly teach a workshop, Digital Humanities in Translation: Communicating Your Scholarship to Multiple Publics, on how to effectively communicate, talk and write about academic work and interdisciplinary scholarship in the various contexts and virtual venues made possible by the Digital Humanities.

Roopika Risam is Assistant Professor of English at Salem State University, Massachusetts. In her research she explores the role of the Digital Humanities in intersecting African American studies, US ethnic studies, and post-colonial studies. She is the creator of numerous digital projects, including The Harlem Shadows Project, a digital edition of Claude McKay’s poetry, and Visualizing Du Bois, a mapping project of Du Bois’s correspondence.

Her lecture at Princeton will partly draw on the latter project, focusing on Du Bois’s literary work and the global perspective of his late career, through the use of digital cultural mapping and citation analysis. Professor Risam’s current book project examines Du Bois’s influence on knowledge infrastructures in the humanities. Her first monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, will come out this year with Northwestern University Press.

Check out the posts published on Professor Risam’s personal blog, which covers aspects of her own research as well as new horizons and challenges of the Digital Humanities in academia. We recommend, for example, a post from 2016 entitled Digital Humanities in Other Contexts. Starting from the provocative proposition that “students are radical contributors to digital scholarship,” Risam reflects on the contexts in which the Digital Humanities are burgeoning, and those in which they are being either contested, derided, or instrumentalized.

Aimée Morrison is an Associate Professor in English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her work investigates the rise of social media as literary and social practices, and the popular reception of digital tools and computer technologies. In her publications she has dealt with the relationship between public scholarship and new media studies, new media and romantic comedy, and compositional strategies in blog writing.

Her current book project explores how the popular use of social media interacts with and modifies personal notions of self-identity. An extract from a working chapter for her book project, discussing “selfies as life-writing,” was published in 2014 on Morrison’s open-access blog Digiwonk.

We invite you to read Prof Morrison’s pieces published in Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism/Slow Academe, a group blog on “the realities of being women in the Canadian University System.” One of her latest posts deals with the “ lost temporality ” of working in academia.