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Professor of English & Digital Studies | University of Maryland — College Park
with affiliations in the Department of African-American Studies, the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, &
director,
African-American Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHUM)
associate director,
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
co-director, irlHumanities
Education
PhD, M.Phil., M.A. – Columbia University : English and Comparative Literature | B.A. – Washington University
⇢ Please click here for my CV
⇢ Click here to visit my profile on humanities commons, including open access publications
⇢ Click here for my bio and pictures
⇢ And go here for my faculty page, which includes links to current course information
Recent Appointments
Professor of English, Amherst College, with affiliations in
the departments of Black Studies & Film and Media Studies
Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Amherst College
Director, Five College Digital Humanities
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, journal issues, crowdsourced arts experiments, and digital projects. Recent projects include Material Conditions 01, co-curated with Cassandra Hradil and Andrew W. Smith for the 2022 Wrong Biennale, and a two-issue “Black DH” edition of Reviews in DH, co-edited with Aleia Brown and Trevor Muñoz.
For 2022-23, Parham serves as a UMD Leader-in-Residence for the Breaking the M.O.L.D. Initiative, which “aims to develop a diverse set of leaders… shaped by arts and humanities scholarly values and distinct skills.” Prior to coming to UMD, Parham was Professor of English and Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Amherst College, and a former director of Five College Digital Humanities.
Currently I teach classes focusing on African-American literary and cultural studies, modern American popular culture, and technologies and representation. I generally teach in one of two modes, either working to train students to use the insights of intersectionality, media theory, and decolonial thinking to reconcile social and historical concerns with the techniques of literary hermeneutics, or helping them to critique and also to produce across different kinds of media, with an emphasis on a range of digital humanities techniques. In both kinds of classes I emphasize close attention to textual and contextual nuance, the development of clear, concise argumentation, and attentiveness to the impact of media form on expression and dissemination.
Classes I have taught in recent years include a lecture and production class on Spike Lee (co-taught w/ John Drabinski), Girlpower!, a digital humanities class focused on gender, feminism, and popular culture, Ghosts in Shells, which is a seminar on passing and the posthuman, and a seminar on space and time in Toomer, Faulkner, and Morrison. I also teach hybridized theory and practice courses in the digital humanities and on video games.
I have taught at Amherst College since 2001. Before that I taught for several years at Hunter College, and also taught high school students through Upward Bound (at Columbia’s Double Discovery Center).
Affiliations
Board of Directors, Mass Humanities (2014 – 2017); Board of Directors, Amherst Cinema Arts Center (2005 – 2013)
Some Awards and Honors
Huntington Library Research Fellowship; Amherst College Faculty Research Award Program; Mellon Foundation teaching innovation grants; Senior Sabbatical Fellowship, Amherst College; Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow, W. E. B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research (The Hutchins Center), Harvard University; Miner Crary Sabbatical Research Fellowship, Amherst College; Mellon-Mays Predoctoral and Doctoral Grants; Woodrow Wilson Travel & Research Grant; Residency Award, School of Criticism and Theory; Marjorie Hope Nicholson Fellowship, Columbia University; magna cum laude, Washington University
Memberships
Modern Language Association (MLA); American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA); American Studies Association (ASA); Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA); Digital Games Research Association;
Let Us Be Weightless is an interactive short story, set in a world similar to our own, one that relies heavily on digital networks and their various underwater infrastructures. But in this world, network technologies carry vestiges of a very different kind of web. And in this world, stormtalkers like Shehn are valuable allies. Being unaligned, as stormtalkers have been for centuries, however, is becoming increasingly dangerous... Read here.
The ten projects that make up Material Conditions 01 come from an international collection of artists, creative technologists, scholars, and makers deeply engaged with materiality, ecology, and storytelling. Each project introduces us to imagined futures and alternate realities through a variety of mediums and material forms that invite us to think differently about our relationship with the natural world and each other. See the exhibit here
"For this issue, we interviewed the Director Marisa Parham and her team of African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHum) at the University of Maryland. Read about Parham and AADHum here."
For Public Books I wrote about new and old forms of loss, of how remembering and forgetting are so tightly tied to experiences of space, to our experiences of natural and built environments— a narrative digital-mapping essay about my own degree zero: grandparents, Chicago, and yet another Black house that is, for all intents and purposes, gone, faded in sync with the eroding Michiana coastline, subject to the same forces. Read at Public Books, here.
Woke up one morning to my weekly dose of gift and curse, which is to say yet another story about Blackness and technology that centers on things that are amazing but also disconcerting, glitched. Enter the #DouglassSelfie. click here to read
This digital essay extends the work undertaken in the .break .dance digital project. Published in Small Axe Archipelagos & produced in response to the theme Slavery in the Machine, it extends its conceptualizations via notions of asymmetrical articulation as set forth by Zora Neale Hurston in "Characteristics of Negro Expression," Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s description of the modern Caribbean as being historically constituted as a series of vast interlocking machines, Édouard Glissant's conceptualizations of Relation and plantation worlds, and Leslie Marmo Silko portrayals of Black diasporic histories and Mardi Gras Black Indian Queens in Almanac of the Dead.
Read.
.break .dance is an experimental digital project that uses Beyoncés visual album Lemonade as a keystone text to ground musings about time, code, and internet experience. Published in Small Axe Archipelagos & produced in response to the theme Slavery in the Machine, .break .dance includes discussions of Flying Lotus' "Never Catch Me" (ft. Kendrick Lamar), Toni Morrison's portrayal of Baby Suggs in Beloved, "Becky" from Jean Toomer's Cane. The critical work of .break .dance also emerges from engagements with Marlene Nourbese Philip's Zong, Kwame Dawes' "Stop Time," Fred Moten's In the Break, and Dalton Anthony Jones' "Northern Hieroglyphics: Nomadic Blackness and Spatial Literacy."
Read.
What kinds of critical structures might be distilled from thinking about technological adoption as itself a kind of Black cultural practice, a practice wherein “the past and future are not cut off from the present” (Ayewa and Phillips)? What might it mean to articulate techne as endemic to African American experience, even if so doing means resetting how we describe or imagine the technical emergence of digital technologies? Understanding the digital as both descriptive and generative of African American experiences of memory, space, and time resets the chronology for what we typically postulate as the technical device emergence of “the digital.”
Debates in Digital Humanities. eds. Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein (U. Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2019)
Read
Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. eds. R. Davis, M. Gold, K. Harris, and J. Sayers (MLA: New York, 2019)
Charles Chesnutt: MLA Approaches to Teaching. eds. Susanna Ashton and Bill Hardwig (MLA: New York, 2017)
Winner of the Sylvia Lyons Render Award by the Charles W. Chesnutt Society
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In its encounter with James Baldwin across form— "Letter to my nephew," "Sonny's Blues," and archival footage of Baldwin being interviewed by the psychologist Kenneth Clark— this explores how Baldwin's figuration of children and his own acts of care illuminate the political possibilities of both filiation and affiliation. Moving so effortlessly between caring for Black children and caring about Black communities exemplifies Baldwin's investment in articulating why the liberation of Black people is important to American liberation more generally. With that in mind, this essay's explorations are set against a backdrop of historical and contemporary state violence against children, from Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry's failed meeting with RFK, to Claudia Rankine's observations of Ferguson, MO in the aftermath of Michael Brown's murder. Printed in The New Centennial Review (Volume 16, Issue 2, 2016)
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Developing less burdensome and more equitable ways to support scholarly difference is a preeminent challenge when thinking about the future of assessment and promotion in higher education. At stake in this is the very capacity of institutions to do the work of scholarly inclusion, to recognize the range of approaches well captured in the digital humanities caucus of the American Studies Association’s succinct 2016 characterization of humanities work that is “innovative, critical, boundary-pushing, justice-based, and experimental work—scholarship that takes a diversity of forms, that reaches and is produced by thinkers, teachers, practitioners, and makers from a wide range of communities and contexts.” Assessment potentially shadows or highlights scholarly identity at every institutional juncture, and this is as true for undergraduate research work as it is for matters of promotion, tenure, or contract renewal for faculty and staff. With that in mind, this article surveys responses to the challenges of assessing DH work in institutional settings, and also reviews the work of Five College Digital Humanities 2016 draft report on digital assessment, "The New Rigor." Printed in American Quarterly (Volume 70, Number 3, September 2018)
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This essay begins with my attempt to close-read a text by a recently departed colleague, Jeffrey B. Ferguson, but turns into an exploration of writing across registers, in this case the delivery of a very different version of the same paper by Ferguson, one that is far more intimate, insightful, and moving.
This post is part of a week-long forum, organized by Mary Hicks, honoring Professor Jeffrey Brown Ferguson who passed away on March 11, 2018. Ferguson was the Karen and Brian Conway ’80 Presidential Teaching Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College.
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According to Glissant,the temporal contradictions endemic to Faulkner's prose are not in themselves problematic because such narrative recursivity is endemic to life in the Americas, as ‘the various ways of telling one single fact’ constitute ‘the stream of consciousness that summarizes (or at least tries to) the circumstances of the country’.
In thinking about this, Glissant turns to the figure of the breadfruit, taking the complex and signifying fruit as the sign that might decode the whole of the rest of Faulkner's writing. In this essay, I take a digital writing-influenced perspective on Glissant's turn to the breadfruit as rhizomatic. I also look at Glissant's journey to Rowan Oak, Faulkner's estate, and the soft melancholy engendered in his racialized encounter with a concretely Faulknerian space.
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interview by Melissa Dinsman L.A. Review of Books, May 19, 2016
by Katherine Duke Amherst Magazine, June 22, 2018 :: here.
The problem of the “yes,” of affirming an historical identity that is potentially harmful to oneself, troubles some of the imaginative leaps necessary to how readers desire to identify with texts. With that in mind, this article reads Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred as a story about memory, history, and embodiment as written both on and through bodies. By articulating both "history" and Black women's bodies as sites of reading and writing, this article broadens conceptualizations of historical trauma. Printed in Callaloo, 32.4 (fall 2009) ⇢ Read
Interviewed by Will Fenton Inside Higher Ed, August 2, 2017
Interviewed by Liz Losh DML Central, February 05, 2018 here.
Sonic Interventions. eds. Joy Smith, et al. (Rodopi Press: Amsterdam, 2007)
What might it mean to “remember” something that is not of one’s own direct experience? To remember someone else’s memories? Looking at texts including Jean Toomer’s Cane, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Bob Kaufman’s poetry, Haunting and Displacement describes phenomena of haunting, displacement, and ghostliness as central to modern African American literature and culture. ⇢ Learn more
Click here to visit Finding Estella: An Octavia E. Butler Research Pocket
Please click here to visit the Black Haunts in the Anthropocene digital essay...
"Without Innovation." In this pocket I'm bringing a vareity of thinkers from the African American tradition— Fred Moten, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass— to bear on two interlocked matters, 1. the continually haunted origins of so much technological innovation, and by extension the digital humanities (think here of the important work typified in the recent issue of differences, on the "dark side" of digital humanities... ⇢ read more
I woke up this morning and looked through the window at the foot of my bed. The trees were swaying in the wind and the snow sugarspun along, left and right, down and around. It was beautiful and I was at home, that fact alone glamorous for a Tuesday morning. My first thought? This storm is boring. It was snowy, but not snowy enough. It was windy, but not windy enough. This was no snowmageddon, no “winter is coming”... continue reading at Medium.com ⇢"