Assistant Vice President for Faculty Equity and Diversity and an Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah
About
Myra Washington is assistant vice president for faculty equity and diversity and an associate professor in ethnic studies at the University of Utah. Her research is situated in the areas of cultural studies, critical media and digital media studies, celebrity studies, comparative ethnic studies (with a focus on African-American and Asian American studies), critical rhetoric, gender and sexuality studies, and the emerging field of critical mixed-race studies.
The critical focus in her research means that she is always examining the ways power enhances or elides the way we understand meta-narratives of identity like race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, etc. She focuses on mediated representations because she is interested in contextualizing the moments that shape representations as they appear and how in turn those representations shape our understandings of each other. Her most recent publication is her book, "Blasian Invasion: Racial Mixing in the Celebrity Industrial Complex" (University of Mississippi, 2017) which theorizes mixed raceness through the racial subjectivities embodied by self-identified “Blasian” (mixed race Black and Asian) celebrities that both does not abjure Blackness and decenters Whiteness as the paradigms of understanding mixed race peoples and race in general.
Current Work:
Myra Washington's current book projects are examinations of mediated representations of Asian/Americans and an analysis of mixed-race identity in post-apartheid South Africa.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Race, mixed race, popular culture, media representations, media & cultural studies
