Prof. Courtney Rivard

• Archival Rhetorics
• Digital Humanities
• Public Humanities
• Critical Game Studies

I am the Director of the Digital Literacy and Communications (DLC) Lab and Assistant Professor in English & Comparative Literature with a secondary appointment in the School of Data Science & Society at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The DLC serves as a hub for innovation in the humanities that focuses on digital literacy, public humanities, digital humanities, and critical game studies. My research is at the intersection of Rhetoric & Composition and Digital Humanities.

My scholarship, teaching, and administrative service all share a commitment to developing interdisciplinary collaborative approaches that center humanistic inquiry alongside computational methods. I am interested in how the information infrastructure of archives create arguments regarding race, gender, class, and national belonging. More specifically, my scholarship is motivated by questions such as how do the information infrastructure of archives and digital collections create arguments regarding race, gender, class, and national belonging? How can community-centered approaches to oral history create more inclusive archival practices? How can interdisciplinary methods that combine close textual analysis and computational analysis be used to address silences in archival records? And how can scholars imagine new forms of scholarship that leverage the potential of digital modalities to reach wider audiences?

As Director of the DLC, I have begun a new research area in critical game studies to explore how theories of play and gaming can help create critical pedagogies that interrogate race, gender and sexuality as well demonstrate how algorithmic rhetoric shapes narrative structures. Recently, I received a NEH grant to create a Critical Gaming Initiative that centers questions of identity and representation in the development of a Critical Game Studies minor. The cornerstone of the initiative is the Greenlaw Gameroom, UNC’s first game-based classroom, funded by a Lenovo Instructional Innovation Grant.