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Roopika Risam is an assistant professor of English and the Faculty Fellow of for Digital Library Initiatives at Salem State University. She is a scholar of digital and postcolonial humanities.

Work

Risam's work focuses on the intersections between postcolonial humanities and ethnic studies. She is the co-director of Reanimate, "an intersectional publishing collective that produces multimodal editions of archival writings by activist women in media." She has published articles in First Monday and Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. She has also included writing in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies and the Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media.

In 2018, Risam was awarded the inaugural Massachusetts Library Association's Civil Liberties Champion Award for her work on Torn Apart/Separados, a digital humanities project documenting the sites of immigrant detention centers in the United States. She also released her first book, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, from Northwestern University Press in 2018.

Education

In 2003, Risam earned her B.A. in Creative Writing and South Asian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her M.A., with distinction, from Georgetown University in 2007 and her Ph.D. in English from Emory University in 2013.

Postcolonial Scholarly Projects
In an effort to understand postcolonialism through scholarship and technology, in addition to important literature, many stakeholders have published projects about the subject. Here is an incomplete list of projects.


 * Bodies and Structure (2019), on the spatial history of Japan and its empire
 * Passamaquoddy People: At Home on the Oceans and Lakes (2014), a digital archive of photos and recordings of the Passamaquaddy people
 * Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds (2017), critical reading of Black and Asian British literature
 * Torn Apart/Separados (2018), visualizations and scholarly journal tracking global crisis situations
 * W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (2019), charts from W.E.B. Du Bois in color about the lives of Black Americans

Along with film and television, literary fandoms are notable for dedicated fan bases and many novels are source material for films and television series. Studies on literary fandoms are incomplete as most literary fandom critique falls under literary theory and “fan studies have ... eroded the boundaries between audiences and scholars, between fan and scholar more than any other field. ” In some cases, studying of fandoms and fan culture have called into question interpretations of the original text, and “studies of fan audiences have challenged the idea of the ‘correct’ or even dominant readings. " Thus literary fandoms have enhanced and challenged traditional ideas of a source text and studies of fandoms from certain books can reinterpret the author’s original meaning. Some literary fandoms include authors Stephen King, who has numerous works made into films with strong fan followings, J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series, Stephanie Meyer and the Twilight phenomenon, as well as classic literature authors Jane Austen, whose fans call themselves Janeites, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes has spawned many adaptations. Literary fandoms can also overlap with television fandoms such as the show Game of Thrones based on George RR Martin’s work. Literary fandoms are a significant subculture engaging in many fan activities listed below.

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According to scholar Henry Jenkins, fandoms are a culture “in which people are bound together by a wide range of desires and expressed through an equally wide range of practices. " One notable fandom is the Buffy The Vampire Slayer fandom, commonly referred to as the Buffistas . The Buffistas--in addition to creating fan films, books, fanzines, and other various media are in part the reason why Buffy The Vampire Slayer has become such a popular culture icon. The fans have dubbed the universe that Buffy takes place in the Buffyverse or Slayerverse, and use this term to refer to the universe where any and all creations take place. Many celebrities and artists have cited Buffy the Vampire Slayer as their inspiration for some or all of their creations. Singer and songwriter Ed Sheeran noted that he watches the show frequently, and calls “some of the soundtrack…brilliant. " Shonda Rhimes, writer and producer for shows such as Grey's Anatomy and Scandal, also noted the importance of Buffy in her development as a writer. Rhimes was quoted saying “I was very inspired by Buffy, mainly because it felt very fresh and new and like something that hadn't been on television before ”.

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Fandoms also influence and create scholarly discourse. One such example is the literature and scholarly work surrounding the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called by fans Buffy studies. Academic papers are collected in Slayage, a fan-generated, peer-reviewed online journal published quarterly. Several books have been written about the television series and the ensuing fandoms in popular culture, including Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Rhonda Wilcox. In writing about how there is continued scholarship and work about the show, Wilcox writes “some publishing companies fear that interest will die now that the series is ended. I think that highly unlikely. People are still talking about Shakespeare and Dickens. ” Portland State University offered a class in spring 2012 titled “Exploring Buffy the Vampire Slayer. ”