Gerald Figal
Professor of History and Japanese Cultural Studies

Director of Asian Studies Program

Email: gerald.figal@vanderbilt.edu
Phone: 615-322-4712
Office: 241 Buttrick Hall
Office Hours: TR 10:30-Noon

My fields are modern Japanese history and cultural studies and postwar Okinawa. I received my Ph.D. from the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Chicago in 1992. My publications include Civilizations and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Duke, 1999), Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa(Rowman & Littlefield, 2012) and articles on war memorials and tourism in Okinawa. I'm currently researching another project on the idea of monsters in contemporary Japanese media and consumerism. My first publication related to that project appears in Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies: "Monstrous Media and Delusional Consumption in Kon Satoshi's Paranoia Agent." My courses range from surveys in Japanese cultural and social history to thematic courses in Japanese popular culture, anime, and the city of Edo-Tokyo. When I am not teaching or doing research or parenting, I am collecting, restoring, and using vintage film cameras, building pinhole cameras, and playing in the darkroom with chemicals of various grades of toxicity. My latest photographic endeavor is 19th-century wet plate collodion.