Assistant Professor, A/PIA Core Faculty, Film, Television, and Media (FTVM), 2018 LSA Collegiate Fellow, FTVM
mphr@umich.edu
Office Information:
Field of study: Asian American studies; media and cultural studies; ethnic studies; American studies
Asian Pacific Islander American Studies
Education/Degree:
Ph.D. English Literature (CUNY Graduate Center)
About
Melissa Phruksachart (prook-sa-shart) is a scholar of Asian American cinema, U.S. film and television, and the political economy of diversity & multiculturalism. She studies moving image media as an archive of and medium for racial formation.
Her first book, Archives of Embarrassment: Making the Asian American Model Minority on Cold War U.S. Television, examines how scripted U.S television of the 1950s and 60s circulated new ideas about Asian racial formation. Reflecting a shift in Cold War race politics, the burgeoning technology of television radically reintroduced Asian Americans into post-WWII domestic spaces as the “model minority” through the stock figures of the enemy, the orphan, the houseboy, and the neighbor. This book uses archival research, textual analysis, and critical race theory to construct and analyze this original archive of Asian American representation. It also produces an industrial history of how Asian American actors navigated the entertainment industry—in their on-screen labor and their off-screen negotiations of roles—to illuminate complex and changing notions of queerness, gender, domesticity, and citizenship.
