Meet the Faculty: Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal is Ruth and Paul Idzik Collegiate Chair in Digital Scholarship and Assistant Professor of English and Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He researches and teaches about the aesthetic and politico-economic entanglements of our technological cultures. His award-winning writing appears, or is forthcoming, in Critical Inquiry, Configurations, American Literature, and Design Issues, among other venues.

He holds a Ph.D. in English and STS from UC Davis and a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Indore. He has also previously been a visiting fellow at the research Cluster “Media of Cooperation” in University of Siegen, Germany and a graduate student at the Universe of Chicago. His research—which is situated at the crossroads of media theory, science and technology studies, and literary criticism—has been supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Linda Hall Library, and the Hagley Museum, among other institutions.

Professor Dhaliwal is currently working on a book project titled Rendering: A Political Diagrammatology of Computation, which asks ‘what exactly is computing?’ Illuminating the hard-coded political logics we take for granted in our contemporary digital cultures, his project shows how our cultural narratives, politico-economic formulations, and epistemic beliefs get crystallized into computational hardware and software architectures.

His other projects have found him researching the entanglements between data and narratives, popular discourses of the future in simulation videogames, material and cultural histories of artificial intelligence, and new taxonomies of internet aesthetics. He is also engaged in several critical making projects, including a number of public-facing game design endeavors.