Dr Rosie Graham BA (Hons), MA, PhD (Exon), AFHEA

• PhD English Studies (University of Exeter)
• MA English Studies with specialist pathway in Criticism and Theory (University of Exeter)
• BA (Hons) English Studies (University of Exeter)

I joined the University of Birmingham’s English Department in 2018. In 2020, I took up the Co-Directorship of the Centre for Digital Cultures. In 2025, I was promoted to Associate Professor.

My primary area of study concerns search engines: how to study them, how to understand their impact on society, and how to create a wider public understanding of the social and ethical issues they generate. In addition to scholarly outputs, I have contributed to various organisations, including the Open Search Foundation, and am a primary author of the #FreeWebSearch Charter. 

In 2024, I co-founded SEASON: Search Engines and Society Network  with Olof Sundin and Dirk Lewandowski. We held our first annual conference in 2025 in Hamburg, Germany. 

I convene and teach modules in digital culture at every level of undergraduate study. In 2018/2019, I am teaching the following:

• Discovering Digital Cultures (1st year, Convenor)
• Digital Futures (2nd year, Convenor)
• The End of Life As We Know It: The Implications of Digital Technology (3rd year, Co-convenor)

I would be very happy to hear from prospective students working in the following areas: digital culture, critical theory, contemporary literature, new media and software studies, literary theory, digital humanities, and videogame studies.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research explores the intersection of technology, language and culture in contemporary media forms within a global context. In 2023, I published Investigating Google’s Search Engine: Ethics, Algorithms, and the Machines Built to Read Us (Bloomsbury Academic). This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to search engine studies, drawing on a range of disciplines to critique Google's search engine from a philosophical, historical, financial, and ethical standpoint. I use these perspectives to explore topics such as algorithmic discrimination, fake news, and modes of platform capitalism. In doing so, I frame contemporary issues within digital culture as part of a longer history of technological engagement, for example, by looking back to Plato's critique of writing, medieval mnemonic techniques, twentieth-century science of cognition, and building on the twentieth and twenty-first-century traditions of critical theory.

I have also published articles specifically focused on the ethical duties of search engines and am currently working in collaboration with Open Search Foundation, contributing to the #ethicsinsearch project and sitting on the ethics working group. These projects aim to raise public awareness of ethical issues, influence European policy, and develop technological alternatives to the hegemony of Silicon Valley.  

I have been involved with several digital projects outside of academia. Between 2013-15 I was employed as the Head of Digital Archiving for Tuckers Hall (Heritage Lottery Funded Project), in which I built and managed a database of textual documents, particularly Minute Books, relating to Exeter’s cloth trade from the 15th Century to the present. During 2014-2017 I worked as a digital consultant for UPID, a technology start-up based in Silicon Valley designing programs for measuring online trustworthiness using Natural Language Processing and Social-Context Networks.

In addition, from 2016 I have worked as a Research Assistant for The COVE: The Central Online Victorian Educator. My work has included providing HTML and CSS markup to 19^th Century texts, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnets and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.