A black person with shoulder length curly hair, parted on the side, looks to her left and smiles. She is wearing big earrings and a red scarf against a black jacket and is seen from the shoulders up.

Dr. Dawn-Elissa Fischer

Professor of Anthropology

Dawn-Elissa Fischer is Professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University, teaching courses on black popular culture, information technology, and virtual ethnography. Awards of note include the NSF Equitable Collaboration in STEM Fellowship (2021-22), the Educator of the Year (2017) from the National Council of Negro Women, Golden Gate Chapter, the Nasir Jones Fellowship (2016), and the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship (2011-12). Having published on the topics of race in cyberspace, popular culture, and globalization, her manuscript reviews Blackness, race, gender, and transnationalism in Japanese hip-hop and anime. 

A founding staff member of Dr. Marcyliena Morgan’s Hiphop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard University in 2001, Fischer continues to consult in an advisory role. The Hiphop Archive houses Fischer’s Japanese Hiphop collection, including Nihon Style, a film about an annual Hiphop festival in Japan that she co-produced with filmmaker Bianca White. Dr. Fischer has published articles about her research concerning race and gender politics in both global and local Hiphop (see  http://faculty.sfsu.edu/~def/content/publications-0). At SF State, Dr. Fischer co-directed the BAHHRS (Bay Area Hip Hop Research and Scholarship) project with Dave “Davey D” Cook, which was awarded the Cesar Chavez Institute’s Community-University Empowerment grant.