is an archivist, curator, & scholar of
Asian/American film, media, & urban spaces.

Janet Louie, ph.d.

I am completing my Ph.D. in East Asian Art, Film, and Cultural Studies with a certificate in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Harvard in May 2026. My book project The Transpacific Color Line: Cold War Asian and American Radio, Film, and Music draws on oral histories, community archives, private collections, and ephemeral materials to explore various the relationship between transpacific media cultural networks and urban history in California.

(See below or in the CV tab in the top right for more information about my academic and professional work.)

My academic and curatorial work has been sponsored by the UCLA Film & TV Archive, Harvard’s Asia Center, the Fairbank Institute for Chinese Studies, & the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. I have worked as researcher and educator in East Asian film and media studies at Harvard since 2016.

Since 2023, I have been affiliated with UCLA and the Hammer Museum as a audiovisual programmer, curator, and collections archivist.

I completed my M.A. in Regional Studies: East Asia at Harvard in 2018 with a thesis entitled “Homoerotic Adaptations of Western Media in Japanese and Taiwanese Fan Comics,”

I received my B.A. in Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, and Architectural History at UC Berkeley in 2015.

hello!

I’m Janet Louie, a scholar of Cold War film, radio, and music history within a transpacific (Asian/Asian American) context. I am especially interested in microhistories of various media cultural scenes. Specific case studies I examine in this project include the first Chinese-language radio station in North America, Chinatown cinema in Los Angeles, Hong Kong-Japan cinematic co-productions, Chinese American home movies, the Southern California sansei band scene.

As an educator, I am interested in the ways that critical analysis and historical research create foundational intellectual and practical skills for students to use in/outside the university. Some classes I have designed and led include lectures in the following:

  • Global Japanese film history

  • Sinophone film and media history

  • Asian American film and media studies

  • Transpacific gender and sexuality studies

  • Chinatown film exhibition history

With respect to my work as an archivist and programmer, my academic and technical expertise is represented by the following collections and specialty collections:

  • Sing Lee Theatre Collection, UCLA Film and Television Archive

    • 35mm film and paper ephemera

  • Golden Star Radio, private collection

    • Shellac 78’s, vinyl records, photography, periodicals, and paper ephemera

  • Chinese American home movies, CHSSC

    • 8mm film and digitized film

  • Sansei/Japanese American band scene, private collection

    • Oral histories, digitized sound recordings, vinyl records, photography, periodicals, paper ephemera

  • Dōjinshi 同人誌, private collection

    • Paper ephemera