Lisa Nakamura

Summer 2012 Mentor

Lisa Nakamura earned a B.A. from Reed College and a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center at City University of New York. She is a professor of Media and Cinema Studies; professor of Asian American Studies; and professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. She is a member of the editorial board of the “Journal of Asian American Studies, Communication” and “Critical/Cultural Studies,” “Games and Culture,” and “New Media and Society.”

Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her main areas of contribution are in interrogating the racial/ethnic assumptions embedded in the representations of race in digital media, particularly within gaming cultures. She is the author of “Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet”, “Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identify on the Internet,” and is co-editor of “Race in Cyberspace.” She has also published articles in “Critical Studies in Media Communication,” “PMLA,” “Cinema Journal,” “The Women’s Review of Books,” Camera Obscura,” and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies.” Currently Nakamura is working on a new monograph on Massively Multiplayer Online Role playing games, the transnational racialized labor, and avatarial capital in a “postracial” world.[5][6] And currently she teaches courses on Asian Americans and media as well as advanced courses on new media criticism, history, and theory.