Gerald Figal
Associate Professor of History and Japanese Cultural Studies

Email: gerald.figal@vanderbilt.edu
Phone: 615-322-4712
Office: 241 Buttrick Hall
Office Hours: TR 11:00-12:30

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) and articles on amateur Japanese historiography and on war memorials and tourism in Okinawa. I just completed a book manuscript -- Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa that is forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield Press in 2012. 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.