Rosie Graham

I joined the University of Birmingham’s English Department in 2018. Prior to this, I completed my PhD at the University of Exeter, where I also taught various modules in critical theory. During my doctoral studies, I twice sailed as a faculty member on the Semester at Sea study abroad programme, sponsored by the University of Virginia. During these voyages, I circumnavigated the globe teaching courses in Travel Writing while visiting 24 countries and leading field classes in Ghana, Japan, Mauritius, India, Poland and Barbados. These experiences have given me a passion for travel and directed my academic work towards global focus.

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.