Lynn Itagaki
Department
Areas of Expertise
Biography
Professor Lynn Mie Itagaki has research interests in interracial ethics, comparative race studies, women of color feminism and twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. literature by writers of color. Her book that examines the post–civil rights era in terms of the 1992 Los Angeles crisis, Civil Racism: The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and the Crisis of Racial Burnout, and she has published articles and reviews in African American Review, Amerasia Journal, Cultural Dynamics, Feminist Formations, MELUS, Modern Fiction Studies, Prose Studies, among others. Her next book projects examine the aesthetics and politics of the media bystander in the post-9/11 era and race and economics in literature after the Great Recession. She was a 2018-2019 Visiting Fellow in the Programme of American Studies at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, and a 2019 Visiting Professor for the International Research Training Group-Diversity at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center.
Analyzing Supreme Court opinions and political theory, Professor Itagaki has recently published on queer/transphobic civility and interracial trust in our contemporary moment for the Connecticut Law Review and Missouri Law Review, respectively, and "racial laundering" in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case that dismantled the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Examining comparative racialization, she has written on "racial pyramidization" and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching and critiques of multiculturalism in Volume III of the Cambridge University Press series Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965-1996. Professor Itagaki has essays on anti-Asian violence appearing in Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto's edited Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities and on what she calls "financial naturalism" in post-Great Recession literature in an anthology on race and economics edited by Vincent Lloyd and Amaryah Armstrong. She and her co-author Jennifer Maria Gülly (William & Mary) have written on German pro-migrant literature and performance art for essays in Modern Fiction Studies and Cultural Dynamics as well as two articles on pro-migrant activism in Periscope: Social Text Online and philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism. Professor Itagaki is also the series editor for Since 1970: Studies in Contemporary America at the University of Georgia Press and on the editorial board for the Journal of American Studies (British Association for American Studies).
Listen to Professor Itagaki talk about civility, inequality and America's civil religion on NPR.
Watch her recorded talk, "Civility in Uncivil Times: Framing the Racial Pyramid and Comparative Racialization" at The Bridge, MU School of Education (5 October 2021).
Education
MA and PhD, English, UCLA.
MA, Asian American Studies, UCLA.
AB, English and American Language and Literature, summa cum laude, Harvard
Research and Publications
Selected Publications
Itagaki, Lynn Mie and Jennifer M. Gülly. “Illiquidity: The Ocean as Matter and Method.” Oceanic Convergences, eds. Magali Compan and Valerie Magdelaine, Presses Universitaires Indianocéaniques, 2024.
Itagaki, Lynn Mie, “Interrogating Civility,” Civility. Eds Michael DiNiscia and Ellyn Toscano. New York: New York University Press, forthcoming, 2024.
Itagaki, Lynn Mie, “Turning on Intersectionality,” Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities. Eds. Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto. New York: Routledge, 2023.
Itagaki, Lynn Mie, “Border Unknowing: Performing Ignorance and Rejecting Humanity in the European Refugee Crisis,” Border Textures, eds Astrid Fellner and Florian Weber (accepted with minor revisions).
Itagaki, Lynn Mie, “The Long Con of Civility,” special issue “How We Argue Now: The Moral Foundations of Politics and Law,” Connecticut Law Review, Vol. 52, No. 3 (February 2021): 1169-86.
Itagaki, Lynn Mie, “Compromising Trust,” Special Issue on Jack Balkin’s The Cycles of Constitutional Time. Missouri Law Review 86.2 (2021): 541–552.
Itagaki, Lynn Mie, “Multiculturalism and Its Discontents,” Volume III: Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965–1996. Eds. Asha Nadkarni and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021.
Itagaki, Lynn Mie, and Jennifer M. Gülly. “Fleeing Bodies and Fleeting Performances: Transience and the Nation-State.” Special issue, “Transient Performance,” eds. Sean Metzger and Kimberly Welch. Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 33, No 1-2 (Feb-May 2021).
Itagaki, Lynn Mie, and Jennifer M. Gülly. “The States of Memory: National Narratives of Belonging, the Refugee Novel, and Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone,” Modern Fiction Studies 66.2 (Summer 2020): 260–80.
Itagaki, Lynn Mie, “Racial Laundering Equality in Shelby County v. Holder,” The Shadow of Selma, eds. Henry Knight Lozano and Joe Street. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2018. 264–288.