research

My main project centers the afterlives of the Cambodian Genocide. I turn to film and narrative representation to excavate the cultural, legal, and aesthetic processes by which events of mass violence become unified and mobile political objects negotiated by those living in their wakes. My research has received generous support from the Center for Khmer Studies, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, the Social Science Research Council, the Institute for Advanced Study, a UMN Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship, a Harold Leonard Film Fellowship, the UMN Community of Scholars Program, and a College of Liberal Arts Graduate Fellowship among other interdisciplinary centers and awards. At the University of Minnesota I worked closely with the Gender Women Sexuality Studies Department, the Asian American Studies Program, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies writing group for graduate students of color and Indigenous graduate students, as well as Bodies that Haunt: Rethinking the Political Economy of Death, a writing collective working toward a special issue on the global traffic in aesthetics and desire around racialized death and haunting methodologies.

Publications

Mitamura, E. 2024. “Toward a marginal understanding of object being in the neoliberal university: after Trinh T Minh-ha.” AGITATE!. In eds. José Manuel Santillana Blanco, Kidiocus King-Carroll, Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny, Kong Pheng Pha in collaboration with Agitate! Editorial Collective. Seditious Acts: Agitate! Special volume with CRES. https://agitatejournal.org/article/toward-a-marginal-understanding/

Mitamura, Emily. “The Coloniality of Abridgement: Afterlives of Mass violence in Cambodia and the US.” Third World Quarterly (March 2019), https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ksHDpzpI4T 3fTH78WkAa/full?target=10.1080/01436597.2019.1568191. (peer reviewed)

(Invited reprint; peer reviewed volume) Mitamura, Emily. “The Coloniality of Abridgement:  Afterlives of Mass Violence in Cambodia and the US.” In Violence and the Third World in International Relations. Ed. Randolph B. Persaud and Narendran Kumarakulasingam. London: Routledge, Dec. 2019.

Reviews

Mitamura Emily. “(California) Dreaming at the 2021 Cambodia Town Film Festival.” Critical Refugee Studies Collective. Jan. 3 2022.

Mitamura, Emily. “Review of Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands, Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz (Duke University Press, 2017).” Peace Review 32:4 (2021), 568-70.

Mitamura, Emily. “Review of Monica Sok’s A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press 2020)” in 100th edition Rain Taxi, 2021.