Adair Rounthwaite is Associate Professor and Chair of the Division of Art History. She is a specialist in contemporary art, and her most recent book is This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).

As a Digital Humanities Summer Fellow, Rounthwaite will study the circulation and complexity of the Pepe the Frog. Originally an illustration by graphic artist Matt Furie that came to be associated with alt-right communities on 4chan in the 2010s, Pepe can function to express a wide range of emotions and ideologies from laid-back pleasure to racist hatred, and appeared at the January 6, 2021 riot on the US Capitol as a symbol of affiliation with the online cultures that supported Donald Trump. Working with a student assistant, Rounthwaite will analyze the circulation and variations of the Pepe meme on digital platforms in the years of the Trump presidency and especially around the time of January 6, to understand the dynamic visual landscape of alt-right social media and its relationship to the live event of the riot.