African Cultural Studies
Researching and teaching the languages and expressive cultures of Africa and Africans around the world since 1964

Reginold Royston

Position title: Assistant Professor

Email: rroyston@wisc.edu

Address:
1466 Van Hise

Reginold Royston headshot

Education

  • Ph.D. African Diaspora Studies & New Media Studies University of California, Berkeley
  • M.A. African American Studies University of California, Berkeley
  • B.A. Anthropology and Philosophy Howard University

Interests

I am media anthropologist and digital humanities researcher, jointly-appointed in the School of Information (formerly SLIS) and the Department of African Cultural Studies. I teach courses on the political economy of information, race/class/gender/identity in tech, Africa, and internet practices in developing world contexts. I coordinate the Black Arts + Data Futures group through the Borghesi-Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshop in the Humanities at the UW-Madison Center for Humanities.

My research interests include New Media and innovation in the African Diaspora. I do ethnographic research in Ghana, the U.S., and the Netherlands, examining Ghana’s digital diaspora. As a researcher, developer and professor of information and technology studies, I have produced and designed dozens of new media apps and campaigns with students and collaborators. I worked for 15 years as a reporter, graphics designer, and cultural critic for Knight Ridder, Village Voice Media, and National Geographic.com. I have been active in community organizations in Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and Oakland, CA.

Additional interests: Africana Cultural Studies; New Media and Sound Studies; Philosophy and History of Information and Communications Technology; Diaspora and Transnationalism; Black Studies; Anthropology; Online Education; Civic Technology for the Public Good.

Public Website

Social Media: @raroyston

Selected Publications

  • Royston, R.A. (forthcoming December 2024) “From the Grammys to Agbogbloshie: African Viral Dance’s Troubled Circuits” The Black Scholar.
  • Royston, R.A. and Ogoti, V. (2023) “Voicing Afro-Modernity: How Black Atlantic Audiobooks Speak Back.” Journal of African Cultural Studies, 35 (4), 392-407
  • Royston, R.A. (2023) “Podcasts and New Orality in the African Mediascape” New Media & Society, 25(9), 2455-2474 originally accepted and published online July 2021.
  • Royston, R.A. (2022) “Soulcraft: Black Techne in African and American Viral Dance,” special issue: Interrogating Digital Blackness, Social Media + Society 8 (2)
  • “Artificial Intelligence, Music Recommendation, and the Curation of Culture.”  Born, G., Morris, J., Diaz, F., and Anderson, A; Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and CIFAR, Canada.
  • Royston, R.A. (2019) “Configuring Ghana’s Diaspora: Deterritorialization, Disjuncture and the Digital.” African Diaspora, a Journal of Transnational Africa. (1-2), 11-37  
  • Royston, R.A. and Strong, K. (2019) “Reterritorializing Twitter: African Moments 2010-2015.” eds. Abigail De Kosnik and Keith Feldman, #Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation, University of Michigan Press. 249-267  
  • “At Home, Online: Affective Exchange and the Diasporic Body in Ghanaian Internet Video” in Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture. eds. Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2017

Courses