Denise Khor

Denise Khor is Associate Professor of Art + Design, and jointly appointed in the Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies (CSSH). Her research and teaching span film and media history, early cinema, nontheatrical film, critical ethnic studies, and Asian American film and media cultures. Khor is the author of Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II (UNC Press, 2022), which was named Choice Outstanding Academic title. The book explores the historical experiences of Japanese Americans at the cinema and traces an alternative network of film production, circulation, and exhibition. Her archival research led to the rediscovery of The Oath of the Sword, a 1914 film produced by a Japanese American film company in Los Angeles. Following the film’s restoration in 2023, supported by a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, Khor presented her research and toured extensively with the film at major international venues including the film’s world premiere at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, as well as presentations at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the Harvard Film Archive, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, NYU Orphan Film Symposium, San Diego Asian Film Festival, and Boston Asian American Film Festival. In 2025, the film was added to the National Film Registry and is now available online through the NFPF. https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/

Her recent scholarship includes co-editing, with Yiman Wang, a special issue of Film Quarterly titled “Asian American Film at 100,” for which she also contributed the essay “A Cinema in Pieces: Archival Rediscovery and Advocacy in Asian American Film History.” She has additionally published work on Asian American documentary media in The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary, edited by Patricia Aufderheide and Joshua Glick, and on Japanese American amateur filmmaking and 16mm camera clubs in A Century in 16mm: The Remaking of Twentieth-Century Cinema, edited by Gregory Waller and Haidee Wasson.

Khor’s current book project, The Invisible Hand: Asian Americans and the U.S. Animation Industry, examines the history of Asian Americans working in American animation from the 1930s to the present. A portion of this research will appear in the forthcoming essay “Coloring the Line: Nisei Women and Racialized Media Work in American Animation” in The Intellect Handbook of Feminist Film Histories, edited by Shelley Stamp.