Denise Khor
Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Visual Studies and Associate Director of Asian American Studies
Denise Khor is a media historian working on early cinema history, film preservation, and Asian American film and media culture. She is the author of Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), which explores the historical experiences of Japanese Americans at the cinema and traces an alternative network of film production, circulation, and exhibition. Areas of research specialization include film and media history, early cinema, nontheatrical film, critical ethnic studies, and Asian American Studies.
Read about the rediscovery of The Oath of the Sword (Japanese American Film Company, US, 1914) here.
She is jointly appointed in the Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies (CSSH) and the Department of Art + Design (CAMD), with a courtesy appointment in History.
In 2019-2020, she was a faculty fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.She has published work in Film Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, Southern California Quarterly, and The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific (edited by Moon Ho-Jung, 2014), among other publications.
She is working on her next book project “The Invisible Hand: A History of Asian Americans in the Animation Industry.”
Prior to Northeastern, she was an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Published Books
- Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II (forthcoming University of North Carolina Press, 2022)
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters
- “Railroad Frames: Landscapes and the Chinese Railroad Worker in Photography, 1865-1869,” The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, ed. Gordon Chang and Shelley
- Fisher Fishkin (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2019)
- “Archives, Photography, and Historical Memory: Tracking the Chinese Railroad Worker in North America,” Southern California Quarterly vol. 98 issue 4 (Winter 2016), 429-456.
- “Dangerous Amusements: Hawaii’s Theaters, Labor Strikes, and Counterpublic Culture, 1909-1934,” The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific, ed. Moon-Ho Jung (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 102-125.
- “‘Filipinos are the Dandies of the Foreign Colonies’: Race, Labor Struggles, and the Transpacific Routes of Hollywood and Philippine Films,” Pacific Historical Review vol. 81 issue 3 (August 2012), 371-403.
Non-Peer Reviewed Publications
- “History Before and Behind the Camera: An Interview with Renee Tajima-Peña,” Film Quarterly vol. 74 no. 1 (Fall 2020), 21-29.
- “Continental Imperialism and the Edges of the Transpacific,” (special forum on Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad), Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Vol. 6 Issue 1 (Spring 2020)
- “The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project,” EDUCAUSE Review Online (June 30, 2014)
- Book Review. “Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire,” Pacific Historical Review (August 2014), 540-541.
- Book Review. “Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity,” AmerasiaJournal 32:2 (2006), 136-138.
2019-2020 Faculty Fellowship, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard
2019-2020 Faculty Research Grant, Labor Resource Center, UMass Boston
2018-2019 High Impact Humanities Course Design Grant, Mellon Foundation, UMass Boston
2018-2019 College of Liberal Arts (CLA) Dean’s Research Grant, UMass Boston
2007-2009 Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Postdoctoral Fellowship, Film & Media Studies, Yale
2006-2007 Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellowship, Williams College
2005-2006 Fletcher Jones Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, University of California
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Education
Ph.D. University of California, San Diego
BA, University of Florida -
Contact
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Address
225F Renaissance Park
