Nona Hendryx

As the 2026 Dartmouth Roth Visiting Scholar, the multihyphenate rockstar has been collaborating with Dartmouth faculty, breaking new ground in music, Afrofuturism and AI.

Nona Hendryx doesn't follow music's timeline—she rewrites it. A founding member of Labelle, inducted into the R&B Hall of Fame in 1999, she co-created three Gold Albums and the worldwide Platinum phenomenon Lady Marmalade. Her solo catalog spans nine studio albums, a Grammy nomination and collaborations with Prince, Peter Gabriel, George Clinton, Talking Heads and Keith Richards—alongside film work, including the Oscar-nominated Precious and compositions for Alvin Ailey's American Dance Theater.

A self-taught technology pioneer since the 1980s, she has experimented with a plethora of new and old electronic instruments and technology. In 2024, that led to creating and producing The Dream Machine Experience—a world-premiere mixed reality installation at Lincoln Center fusing AR, VR and AI through an Afrofuturist lens, featuring George Clinton, Laurie Anderson, Mickalene Thomas, Skin and Vernon Reid. From Lady Marmalade to the Nonaverse—Nona Hendryx has never stopped asking what music can become.

DJ Spooky 

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky is currently at work on two books: one about the impact of algorithms on how we think of storytelling, Digital Fiction for Duke University Press, and The Future of Food, about the impact of AI on how we think of the production of food in the 21st Century. He was Artist in Residence at Yale University Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (2023-2024). He is a composer, multimedia artist and writer whose work engages audiences in a blend of genres, global culture and environmental and social issues. Miller has collaborated with an array of recording artists, including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Metallica, Chuck D from Public Enemy, Steve Reich, and Yoko Ono amongst many others. His 2018 album, DJ Spooky Presents: Phantom Dancehall, debuted at #3 on Billboard Reggae.

His large-scale, multimedia performance pieces include "Rebirth of a Nation," Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Seoul Counterpoint, written during his 2014 residency at Seoul Institute of the Arts. His multimedia project Sonic Web premiered at San Francisco's Internet Archive in 2019. He was the inaugural artist-in-residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's The Met Reframed, 2012-2013. Learn more BIO - DJ Spooky 

Roopika Risam

Roopika Risam is the author of Data Empire (one of Barack Obama's 2026 summer reading picks!) and Professor of Film and Media Studies Department and the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth College. Her research explores how histories of race, empire, and technology shape the modern world. Risam joined the Dartmouth faculty in 2022 and serves as the Chair of Film and Media Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature.

Risam is internationally known for her research and initiative-building in digital humanites. Her work has been supported by over $4.3 million in grants from funders including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. Risam received the inaugural Massachusetts Library Association Civil Liberties Champion Award (2018) for her work promoting equity and justice in the digital cultural record and the 2023 International Association for Research in Service Learning and Community Engagement Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award for her work on anti-racist community engagement.

Risam's latest book, Data Empire  (HarperCollins US and Torva/Penguin UK, 2026) received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was a 2026 NPR  Summer Reading Pick and President Barack Obama's 2026 Summer Reading List. Her first book, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy  (Northwestern UP, 2019) has been taught in more than 150 courses at universities around the world and is a fixture on digital humanities syllabi. Risam is currently writing Undisciplined Digital Humanties: Designing for the World We Want  for Bloomsbury with Jacqueline Wernimont.

Jacqueline Wernimont

Jacqueline D. Wernimont is Distinguished Chair of the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Department and Professor of Film and Media Studies. She is a faculty affiliate for programs in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Quantitative Social Sciences and Co-Director of HASTAC. She specializes in long histories of digital media, histories of quantification, and technologies of commemoration. She also has active research on the resource consumption of intensive computing applications, using digital tools to understand and communicate medical history and practices, and on the use of off-the-shelf tools to transform data into something people can engage with all five senses (data visceralization).

Her first book, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (MIT Press, 2018) traces long histories (21st century to 16th century) of technologies that count human life and death, including wearable devices, body measurements and body counts.

With Elizabeth Losh she also co-edited Bodies of Information: Feminist Debates in Digital Humanities, which is part of the University of Minnesota Debates in Digital Humanities series.