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 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. 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 an edited volume on the global traffic in aesthetics and desire around racialized death.
Publications
Mitamura, Emily. “Toward a marginal understanding of object being in the neoliberal university: after Trinh T Minh-ha.” AGITATE!. Special issue Seditious Acts: Graduate Students of Color Organizing Against the Neoliberal University. (accepted/forthcoming 2023)
(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. “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.