Bio
Lisa 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, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, PMLA, Cinema Journal, Women’s Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is working on a new monograph on social inequality in virtual worlds. Her research focuses on race and gender in online social spaces such as massively multiplayer online role playing games, and she is currently investigating the racializaton of labor in transnational contexts and avatarial operations in a “postracial” world.