Courtney Rivard

Courtney Rivard, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. Previously she was an Assistant Professor in English & Comparative Literature with a secondary appointment in the School of Data Science & Society at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. While at UNC, she founded and directed both the Digital Literacy and Communications (DLC) Lab and the Critical Game Studies Program from 2018-2026. Additionally, she founded the Greenlaw Gameroom, UNC’s first game-based classroom. 

As a scholar who sits at the intersection of rhetoric, composition, and digital humanities (DH), Dr. Rivard focuses on the rhetoric of infrastructures and procedures that shape information systems, particularly archives and digital collections. Her scholarship, teaching, and administrative service combine to integrate humanistic inquiry with computational methods to address gaps in the historical record and serve community needs. This work comes in many forms including: her first book, Layered Lives: Race and Representation in the Southern Life History Project (Stanford University Press, 2022); articles in Computers and Composition, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and Digital Humanities Quarterly; community engaged projects such as From the Rock Wall to Wikipedia and Forever Chemicals in North Carolina: A Story Archive; international collaborations with Kings College London and Universität Tübingen, and student-centered digital pedagogies on critical games studies and digital archives.

Dr. Rivard’s work has been supported by significant funding including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Center for Faculty Excellence/Lenovo Instructional Innovation. Additionally, she recently served as a Thorp Faculty Engaged Research Fellow and received a university wide faculty award for Global Excellence.