James started working at the Australian National University in 2024, as founding director of the HASS Digital Research Hub. Before ANU, he was Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and founding director of King's Digital Lab. He also served as deputy director of eResearch at King’s. James is a New Zealand historian by training and has worked a contract lecturer and later senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This involved helping develop the UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive and designing New Zealand’s first digital humanities teaching programme. He has also worked in the government and commercial IT sectors in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, as a technical writer, editor, business analyst, and project manager.
James has been involved in numerous digital humanities and social science (HASS) projects in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Jordan, Europe, and Australia. His current projects include AI as Infrastructure (a project exploring the use of Large Language Models for historical research), the ARDC Community Data Lab Research Software Engineering Capability Enhancement Project (RSE-CEP) and the ARDC Social Science Research Infrastructure Network (SSRIN) project. He has published widely, with books including The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (with Alan Liu and Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, University of Minnesota Press, 2026), and Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age (Routledge, 2026).