Lisa Nakamura

Lisa Nakamura is an American professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and gender and women’s studies. She teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also the Coordinator of Digital Studies and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures.

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

Nakamura's research includes feminist theory, race and gender in new media, film and television studies, Asian American studies, digital media theory, and digital game studies. Nakamura's main areas of contribution are in interrogating the racial/ethnic assumptions embedded in the representations of race in digital media, particularly within gaming cultures.

From 2007 to 2012, Nakamura held positions at the University of Illinois 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.

She is a professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and 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. She serves on the international advisory board of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

At Michigan, she teaches courses on Asian Americans and media as well as advanced courses on new media criticism, history, and theory.

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.

Nakamura has analyzed issues of gold farming in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. In that game, friction resulted from U.S. players of the 2004 release finding themselves competing with Chinese-based players who were employed to generate in-game resources to be sold on trading sites. In her analysis of gold farming, media scholar Nakamura wrote that although "players cannot see each other's body while playing, specific forms of game labor, such as gold farming and selling, as well as specific styles of play, have become racialized as Chinese, producing new forms of networked racism that are particularly easy for players to disavow."