Michael Baskett

Michael Baskett is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies. His area of specialization is Japanese film studies and research interests in East Asian film, transnational and diasporic cinemas, early cinema, and colonial film culture. Baskett earned his doctoral degree from UCLA, was a Fulbright fellow in Japanese film at Waseda University (Tokyo) and a Japan Foundation Visiting Professorship at Meiji University (Tokyo). Previously, Baskett worked in the Japanese film industry in distribution, exhibition, and production and was an assistant director on the 1995 feature films Flirt directed by Hal Hartley (Henry Fool, Amateur) and the 1997 feature film The Soong Sisters directed by Mabel Cheung (An Autumn's Tale, Beijing Rocks). Baskett previously served as the Film/DVD Editor for The Moving Image, the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). Together with William Tsutsui Baskett co-edited a volume entitled The East Asian Olympiads, 1934-2008: Building Bodies and Nations in Japan, Korea, and China (Brill, 2011) the first scholarly study of how the Olympics in Asia were appropriated by nation-states, interest groups, commercial concerns, and the media as patriotic exercises, yardsticks of social progress, and shaped ideals of individual health and national strength. Baskett's first book The Attractive Empire—Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2008) is the first comprehensive history of the Japanese colonial enterprise of film culture in Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. Baskett's work has been translated into Korean, Dutch, and French, and appeared in a variety of journals including China Information, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Diasporas, Japanese Studies, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Currently, Baskett is completing a manuscript on Japan's Cold War cinema and the politics of transnational film exchange in Cold War Asia as well as a monograph on Ziv Television.