Rosie Graham

I research search engines, digital culture and games. I am Associate Professor in Contemporary Literature and the Digital at the University of Birmingham.

Search engines are part of everyday life, but the choices behind their results are often difficult to see. I study how their commercial interests, design and cultural assumptions shape the information we encounter and the ways we understand it.

My book, Investigating Google's Search Engine (Bloomsbury, 2023), brings ethical and cultural questions into conversation with the economics of search. I examine how Google represents people and ideas, shapes memory and knowledge, and gives commercial value to language and attention.

Investigating Search develops this work through interactive resources. The Interface brings together reflective prompts and topic notes. In Perspective is the research viewer and bibliography, offering different ways to explore the scholarship behind these questions.

I teach and research games and interactivity, with a special interest in solo TTRPGs, queer and trans* gaming, and non-traditional forms. My work includes research on trans representation in A Normal Lost Phone, doctoral supervision in game localisation, and the Solo RPG Influence Map.

My work with digital collections began in archives. From 2013 to 2015, I led digital archiving for Tuckers Hall in Exeter, building a database of records of the city's cloth trade. I later worked on digital editions of nineteenth-century texts for the Central Online Victorian Educator, COVE.

I co-founded the Search Engines and Society Network, SEASON, and was Programme Chair for its 2026 conference. I am also a co-author of the Open Search Foundation's 2025 #FreeWebSearch Charter: Search for the Common Good. Alongside my research and teaching, I work with organisations on search, digital trust and the cultural questions raised by technology.