Brandon Murakami earned his BA in English from UH Mānoa and is currently a Ph.D. student in UF’s English department. His scholarly interests intersect in three fields: (new) media studies, children’s literature & culture, and comic studies/visual rhetoric. Brandon’s current focus for the Spring 2019 semester charts the rise of food show’s popularity as a form of entertainment and the ways in which class, identity, and representation are encoded and decoded. His previous work is relatively diverse, ranging from Postcolonial literature in the Pacific, the impact of the adventure yarn for the Empire’s subjects, as well as a recent meditation on writing digitally via Tumblr, memes, and millennial humor.