Professor Lynn Mie Itagaki is an award-winning educator and writer who researches and speaks about interracial relations, Asian American history, law, and politics to academic and popular audiences. As an Associate Professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Missouri, she is a nationally recognized expert on interracial civility and conflict who has been interviewed by NPR, PBS, Time, and other local and national podcasts and radio shows. Her 2016 book, Civil Racism: The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and the Crisis of Racial Burnout, examines the post–civil rights era in terms of the 1992 Los Angeles interracial conflict. Professor Itagaki’s 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. 

Recently, she has published essays in law reviews such as “The Long Con of Civility” and “Compromising Trust,” and discussed the challenges to the Voting Rights Act through multiculturalism and "racial laundering" in the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder. Her forthcoming analysis of intersectionality’s impact on Asian American experiences will appear in Jennifer Nash and Samantha Pinto’s Routledge Companion to Intersectionality. Professor Itagaki was a 2018-2021 Visiting Fellow at Northumbria University, England, and a 2019 Visiting Professor at Saarland University, Germany. She serves as the co-editor for the book series Since 1970: Studies in Contemporary America at the University of Georgia Press.