B.A. Vassar College
Ph.D Political Theory – University of Minnesota
Emily Mitamura is a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Sexuality, Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. They are a poet and scholar of gender, race, film, and empire. Her current book project emerges from her dissertation centering narrative afterlives of colonial and mass violence in Cambodian life.
They received their PhD in political theory working closely with Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies graduate group at the University of Minnesota. With commitments to Third World and women of color feminisms, critical refugee studies, postcolonial thought, and Asian/American expressive culture, the book project explores how the story of violence becomes a terrain of political life negotiated, contested, and reimagined by survivors and their kin. Their poetry proceeds from continuous archival, relational, and bodily hauntings and experimentations. Her academic work has been supported by a 2023-4 Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, the Center for Khmer Studies, the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, a Harold Leonard Memorial Film Fellowship, and other interdisciplinary awards and centers.
Their research has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultural Studies, AGITATE!: Unsettling Knowledges, Third World Quarterly, Violence and the Third World in IR (Routledge 2022), as well as her poetry in [PANK], Kweli Journal, AAWW: The Margins, and elsewhere. They are currently teaching courses on global and women of color feminisms, girlhood, Asian American cultural and literary studies, feminist political thought, and film.