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Current Appointment

Professor of English, Amherst College, with affiliations in the departments of

Black Studies & Film and Media Studies

Director, irlHumanities

Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Amherst College

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 academia.edu

⇢ And go here for my faculty page, which includes links to current course information

Marisa Parham is Professor of English at Amherst College, and directs the Immersive Reality Lab for the Humanities (irlH), which is a workgroup for digital and experimental humanities. She also serves as a faculty diversity and inclusion officer.

Her 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 a history of increasing complexity in texts produced by African Americans, and how they also offer ways of thinking about intersectional approaches to digital humanities and technology studies.

Please click here to learn more about her writing and research.

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;

Writing & Research

“Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality”

Debates in Digital Humanities. eds. Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein (U. Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2019)
“Hashtag”

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. eds. R. Davis, M. Gold, K. Harris, and J. Sayers (MLA: New York, 2019)
“Rebooting Race: Virtuality and Embodiment in The House Behind the Cedars”

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
“17, or, Tough, Dark, Vulnerable, Moody— James Baldwin”

The New Centennial Review (Volume 16, Issue 2, 2016)
“99 Problems: Assessment, inclusion, and other old-new paradigms”

American Quarterly (Volume 70, Number 3, September 2018)
“Freedom, Equality, and Race”: Remembering Jeffrey B. Ferguson

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.
“Breadfruit, time and again: Reading Glissant in the World Relation”
“The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Marisa Parham”

interview by Melissa Dinsman L.A. Review of Books, May 19, 2016
“Deconstructing the Game”

by Katherine Duke Amherst Magazine, June 22, 2018 :: here.
“Saying ‘Yes’: Textual Traumas in Octavia Butler’s Kindred”

Callaloo, 32.4 (fall 2009)
“The New Wave in Digital Humanities”

Interviewed by Will Fenton Inside Higher Ed, August 2, 2017
“Teaching Underrepresented Students How to Navigate Higher Ed Via Digital Humanities”

Interviewed by Liz Losh DML Central, February 05, 2018 here.
“You Can’t Flow Over This: Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic Illusion”

Sonic Interventions. eds. Joy Smith, et al. (Rodopi Press: Amsterdam, 2007)
“Octavia Butler Fans Psyched Over Two New Science Fiction Tales”

The Root. (June 26, 2014)

#VR for Everybody? Some thoughts on crowdfunding DH

When I tell people we’re running a crowdfunding campaign for our digital humanities (DH) project, their first question, before even asking about my project, is “why?” Why would you fundraise? It’s a good question: I’m a tenured professor at a “research college,” and I direct a digital humanities program at Five Colleges. What you should hear in that declaration is you have affiliations; you have access. But it is precisely because of this access and affiliation that I also have to think about what it means to not have it. Whether I admit it or not, I have joined the gatekeeping class. Read more.
Pull the Handle

... I know there are some meta things I could say here about shock, about how the bright flash of the event’s suddenness made the memory into this weirdly static thing. But let that be someone else’s job... ⇢ read more
Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations

Each of the authors in this collection takes up a different aspect of Glissant’s work and extends it in different directions. twentieth-century French philosophy (Bergson, Badiou, Meillassoux), the cannon of Caribbean literature, North American literature and cultural theory, and contemporary cultural politics in Glissant’s home country of Martinique all receive close, critical treatment. What emerges from this collection is a vision of Glissant as a deeply philosophical thinker, whose philosophical character draws from the deep resources of Caribbean memory and history. Glissant’s central notions of rhizome, chaos, opacity, and creolization are given a deeper and wider appreciation through accounts of those resources in detailed conceptual studies. ⇢ Learn more
Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and Culture

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
Apocalypse, Afro- Futurism, and Post-Ecological Time

This is a talk I gave on Octavia Butler at the American Studies Association conference in November 2014. As you can see from the title, it covers a lot. It’s a survey of ideas, with some comments on the difference between afrofuturism and astrofuturism. Most of my discussion on Butler comes at the end. ⇢ Watch presentation
Finding Estella: An Octavia E. Butler Research Pocket

Click here to visit Finding Estella: An Octavia E. Butler Research Pocket
The Black Haunts in the Anthropocene Project

Please click here to visit the Black Haunts in the Anthropocene digital essay...
Black Haunts in the Anthropocene

These images are interesting to me because their inky flows remind me of wind’s dark power, that wind is both fuel and engine, an element in every sense. And the headline feels wrong because the images contradict it so fully— the images actually “say” too much. ⇢ read more
“Without Innovation: African American Lifeworlds and the Internet of Things”

"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
precipitation

So here I was, with the daunting task of writing about an exhibit that was “about” everything that cannot be experienced from a far distance— tactility, aroma. It seemed to me that Persson’s exhibit would require the visitor’s nodal body to act self-consciously as the site of encounter with the sculpture. In this exhibit, what is familiar to the eye would also undeniably be understood as something else to the hand and foot. ⇢ read more
When nothing happens

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 ⇢"
Selma, shadowing

But what DuVernay puts front and center is the terror that comes with asking people to join you in that darkness, to be willing to die suddenly and brutally. Not only is the audience haunted by its knowledge that King <em>will</em> die, we must also come to terms with the fact that violence was King's only real card, in the sense that it would take the spectacle of physical brutality to motivate recognition of the daily subjugation of black people. And, for that to work, people had to be willing to risk their lives, and King's team had to be willing to ask them to do so and watch them as they suffered and died. ⇢ Read more

Marisa Parham

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Writing & Research

“Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality”

“Hashtag”

“Rebooting Race: Virtuality and Embodiment in The House Behind the Cedars”

“17, or, Tough, Dark, Vulnerable, Moody— James Baldwin”

“99 Problems: Assessment, inclusion, and other old-new paradigms”

“Freedom, Equality, and Race”: Remembering Jeffrey B. Ferguson

“Breadfruit, time and again: Reading Glissant in the World Relation”

“The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Marisa Parham”

“Deconstructing the Game”

“Saying ‘Yes’: Textual Traumas in Octavia Butler’s Kindred”

“The New Wave in Digital Humanities”

“Teaching Underrepresented Students How to Navigate Higher Ed Via Digital Humanities”

“You Can’t Flow Over This: Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic Illusion”

“Octavia Butler Fans Psyched Over Two New Science Fiction Tales”

#VR for Everybody? Some thoughts on crowdfunding DH

Pull the Handle

Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations

Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and Culture

Apocalypse, Afro- Futurism, and Post-Ecological Time

Finding Estella: An Octavia E. Butler Research Pocket

The Black Haunts in the Anthropocene Project

Black Haunts in the Anthropocene

“Without Innovation: African American Lifeworlds and the Internet of Things”

precipitation

When nothing happens

Selma, shadowing

contact

Marisa Parham
Professor of English and Director,
Five College Digital Humanities

Amherst College
Department of English
P.O. Box 5000
Amherst, MA 01002

mparham at amherst dot edu

Click here to make a phone, Skype, or in person appointment.