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)

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

Rosie's 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, she has contributed to various organisations, including the Open Search Foundation, and is a primary author of the #FreeWebSearch Charter. 

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

Rosie has taught modules in digital culture at every level of undergraduate study and at MA level, working as designer, convenor, co-convenor and lecturer. These include:

• Discovering Digital Cultures (first-year level, convenor)
• Digital Futures (second-year level, designer and convenor)
• Our Digital World (second-year level, designer and convenor)
• The End of Life As We Know It: The Implications of Digital Technology (third-year level, co-designer and co-convenor)
• Interactivity: The Theory and Practice of Getting Stuck In (third-year level, designer and co-convenor)
• Living in Code (MA level, co-designer and co-convenor)

Rosie 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 video game studies.

Rosie's research explores the intersection of technology, language and culture in contemporary media forms within a global context. In 2023, she 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. She uses these perspectives to explore topics such as algorithmic discrimination, fake news, and modes of platform capitalism. In doing so, she frames 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.

Rosie has also published articles specifically focused on the ethical duties of search engines and is 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.

Rosie has been involved with several digital projects outside of academia. Between 2013–15, she was employed as the Head of Digital Archiving for Tuckers Hall (Heritage Lottery Funded Project), in which she 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, she 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, Rosie has worked as a Research Assistant for The COVE: The Central Online Victorian Educator. Her 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.