Rebecca Jo Kinney

Associate Professor
School of Cultural and Critical Studies
335 Shatzel Hall | 419-372-4378 | rkinney@bgsu.edu | Academia Page

Rebecca Jo Kinney is a Fulbright Scholar and an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA. Dr. Kinney’s award-winning first book, Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier argues that contemporary stories told about Detroit’s potential for rise enables the erasure of white supremacist systems. Her second book Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt challenges ideas about the invisibility of Asian Americans in the urban Midwest by linking the contemporary development of Cleveland’s “AsiaTown” to the multiple and fragmented histories of Cleveland’s Asian American communities from the 1940s to present day. Her third book, Making Home in Korea: The Transnational Lives of Adult Korean Adoptees, is based on research undertaken while she was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea. Her research has appeared in American Quarterly, Food, Culture & Society, Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Radical History Review, Race&Class, among other journals.

Professional Affiliations:
  • Fulbright Scholar, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea 2021-2022
  • Associate Professor, School of Cultural and Critical Studies 2018-present affiliated, American Culture Studies Program, 2018-
  • Assistant Professor, School of Cultural and Critical Studies 2012-2018
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
  • Ethnic Studies
  • American Studies
  • Urban Studies
  • Asian American Studies
  • Popular Culture
  • Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Methods
EDUCATION:
  • Ph.D. University of California, San Diego, Ethnic Studies, 2011
  • M.A. University of California, San Diego, Ethnic Studies, 2006
  • B.A. University of Michigan, American Culture and Sociology, 2001
SELECT COURSES TAUGHT:

Undergraduate

  • Capstone Seminar
  • Qualitative Research Methods
  • Narratives of Race and Place in Contemporary American Film
  • Race, Place, and Popular Culture
  • Introduction to Asian American Studies

Graduate

  • Building the American City: How Race Shapes Place
  • “Doing American Studies”: A Course in Qualitative Methods,
  • Cultural Tourism
  • Teaching American Culture Studies: A Course in Pedagogy
CURRENT PROJECTS:

Dr. Kinney is currently working on her third book-length project, Making Home in Korea: The Transnational Lives of Adult Korean Adoptees, a Fulbright supported ethnographic study of the returned population of adult transnationally adopted Koreans. This community-centered ethnography echoes multi-generational studies of transnational diasporic homemaking and raises the question once more: what is home for transnational subjects? Yet, it also is attentive to the unique situatedness of a community that is literally of and between these two nations because of forced migration as children and voluntary return migration as adults.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS:
Books:
  • Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2025.
  • Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
    • Awarded
      • 2018 Institute for Humanities Research Transdisciplinary Book Award, University of Arizona.
      • 2018 Midwest Popular Culture and American Culture Association’s Best Single Work by One or More Authors.
Articles and Essays
  • Kinney, Rebecca Jo. 2024. “Transnational Tastemakers in the Seoul Food Scene: Korean Adoptees and the Language of Food,” in Zur, Dafna, ed. “Korean Cuisine Gone Global: Papers from the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center Conference.” Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center working paper. Stanford University. December: 7-18 (invited essay).
  • Kinney, Rebecca Jo. 2023. “The Cleveland Asian Festival as Scenario: Performing and Unsettling Racial Scripts,” American Studies, “Unsettling Global Midwests,” Volume 62, Issue 4, Winter: 147-172.
  • Kinney, Rebecca Jo. 2023. “Flavors of East LA in the Heart of Seoul: Transnational Korean Adoptee Food Ways,” Verge: Studies in Global Asia Volume 9, Issue 2, Fall: 130-156.
  • Kinney, Rebecca Jo. 2020. “ ‘Life of Paper’: From Record Keeping to Justice,”
  • The 1st Adoption Truths Day International Conference Proceedings, Seoul, Korea: KoRoot: 36-40 (invited essay).
  • Kinney, Rebecca J. 2018. “ ‘America’s Great Comeback Story’: The White Possessive in Detroit Tourism,” American Quarterly, Vol. 70, Issue 4: 777-806.
  • Kinney, Rebecca J. 2017. “Detroit is Closer Than You Think,” Radical History Review, Issue number 129: 164-176 (invited essay).
  • Kinney, Rebecca J. 2017. “Author Response: Beautiful Wasteland,” invited Author Response to Reviews of Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Book Review Symposium: 1-12 (invited essay).
  • Kinney, Rebecca J. 2017. “Riding Shotgun with an L.A. Son: Narratives of Race, Place, and Mobility in Roy Choi’s Culinary Autobiography” Food, Culture & Society, Vol. 20, Issue 1: 59-75.
  • Kinney, Rebecca J. 2015. “The Auto-Mobility of Gran Torino’s American Immigrant Dream: Cars, Class, and Whiteness in Detroit’s Post-Industrial Cityscape,” Race & Class, Vol. 57, Issue 1: 51-66.
  • Kinney, Rebecca J. 2014. “’But I Don’t See Race’: Teaching Popular Culture and Racial Formation Theory in an Era of Colorblindness,” Transformations, Vol. XXIV No. 1 & 2: 40-55.
  • Kinney, Rebecca J. 2012. “Longing for Detroit: The Naturalization of Racism through Ruin Porn and Digital Memories,” Media Fields Journal, Issue 5 (2012): 1-14.

School of Cultural and Critical Studies

Dr. Angela Nelson, Director

419-372-8886
230 Shatzel Hall Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH 43403

Updated: 09/16/2025 10:04AM