Lisa Nakamura

Nakamura earned a B.A. from Reed College and a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center at City University of New York.[1]

From 2007 to 2012, Nakamura held positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign as a professor in the Institute of Communication Research, a professor of Media and Cinema Studies, a professor of Asian American Studies, and the Director of the Asian American Studies Program.[4] 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.[5]

She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (2008), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (2013) and is co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (2013). She has also published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cinema Journal, The Women’s Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. 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.[1][6]

She teaches courses on Asian Americans and media as well as advanced courses on new media criticism, history, and theory.[1][6]

She is a professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and gender and women’s studies.[1] 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.[1][6] She serves on the international advisory board of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.[7]

The main areas of contribution of Lisa Nakamura are in interrogating the racial/ethnic assumptions embedded in the representations of race in digital media, particularly within gaming cultures.[8] Her main work is Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (2008), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (2013) and she is co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (2013). She has also published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cinema Journal, The Women’s Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies.

Nakamura is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (2008), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (2013) and is co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (2013). She has also published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cinema Journal, The Women’s Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. 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.[1][6]

Nakamura's first book, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, discusses the visual cultures of the Internet and the type of information we seek online. She is interested in the emergence and immense popularity of racially themed websites that are created by for and about people of color. She is interested in what she terms the “racio-visual logic of the internet.” Jessie Daniels of Hunter College, City University of New York argues that the book's central insight is that the Internet is a “visual technology, a protocol for seeing that is interfaced and networked in ways that produce a particular set of racial formations.” From Facebook to YouTube to avatars to video games, visual representations online incorporate the embodied, gendered, and racialized self online.[9][10]

Doris Witt of the University of Iowa reviews the book, Race in Cyberspace edited by Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman. In an effort to open up a “space where a larger, more extended, and more inclusive conversation about race and cyberspace can take place,” Witt discusses how the book discusses the processes through which race is performed online by privileged consumers of cyberspace rather than the way in which cyberspace has been produced by and has helped reproduce a racialized global division of labor.[11][12]

As for short pieces like book reviews and journal articles, Lisa Nakamura has written dozens of pieces so far, including “Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet.”, “Prospects for a Materialist Informatics: An Interview with Donna Haraway.",[15] “I See You? Gender and Disability in Avatar.”,[16] “Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital,”,[17] etc. The main research area of these articles is to question the racial / ethnic hypothesis in the racial representation of digital media (especially game culture).