Marisa Parham

Marisa Parham is Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park, where she directs the African American Digital Humanities initiative (AADHUM), and is the director for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She also co-directs the Immersive Realities Lab for the Humanities (irLh), and currently chairs the ACLS Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship.

Parham’s current teaching and research projects focus on texts and technologies that problematize assumptions about time, space, and bodily materiality. She is particularly interested in how such terms share histories of increasing complexity in literary and cultural texts produced by African Americans, and how they enable experimental approaches to digital humanities, electronic narrative, and technology studies. Recent examples of this work include “Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality,” and the digital-interactive scholarly essays "Breaking, dancing, making in the machine" and .break .dance, which is also anthologized in the Electronic Literature Collection (ELC4) and was a 2021 honorable mention for the N. Katherine Hayles award from the Electronic Literature Organization. She is currently at work on Black Haints in the Anthropocene, a book-length digital-interactive narrative concerning memory, digitality, and environmental experience, and ConvocationAR, an XR-driven humanities-computing project.

Parham holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is the author of Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and Culture, The Princeton Review's African-American Student’s Guide to College, co-editor with John Drabinski of Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations, and the author, designer, and/or programmer for numerous other essays, crowdsourced arts experiments, and digital projects.