Marisa Parham

Marisa Parham is Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park, where as P.I. she directs the African American Digital and Experimental Humanities initiative (AADHUM) and NarraSpace, an immersive scholarly storytelling lab focused on queer, BIPoC, and migratory experiences. She is also associate director for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and holds affiliate faculty appointments in African-American and Africana Studies, in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the program in Immersive Media and Design, and in the program in Comparative Literature. 

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 this connection enables 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 longform digital-interactive scholarly essay .break .dance, which is also anthologized in the Electronic Literature Collection (ELC4), was a 2021 honorable mention for the N. Katherine Hayles Award from the Electronic Literature Organization, and has been a featured exhibit at THE NEXT (2024). She is currently at work on The Black Haints Projects, a book-length digital-interactive narrative concerning memory, digitality, and environmental experience, ConvocationAR, an XR-driven humanities-computing project, and Black Digitalities, a book that seeks to broaden understandings of “the digital turn” by centering Black digital techné across expressive registers. In 2024 Parham received a Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award from UMD.

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 [unhurried] {witness}, a Black feminist lifeworlds project designed in collaboration and with curation by Seren Sensei; 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 the journal Reviews in DH, co-edited with Aleia Brown and Trevor Muñoz. 

Parham also co-directs the Immersive Realities Lab for the Humanities (irLh), and currently chairs the ACLS Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship. For 2022-25, 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.