Faculty

Gerald Figal
Associate Professor of History
Associate Professor in East Asian Studies Program

PhD, Chicago, 1992

Modern Japanese cultural and intellectual history; Postwar Okinawa; war memorialization; critical theory; cultural studies; Japanese animation.

Telephone: 615-322-4712
Email: gerald.figal@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: M, W 10:30-noon
Office: Buttrick Hall 241

Personal websites:
http://figal-sensei.org
http://www.flickr.com/photos/goyaboy

Gerald Figal has appointments in the History Department and the East Asian Studies Program where he does teaching and research in modern Japanese cultural history and post-WWII Okinawa. He is the author of Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Duke UP, 1999), a study of how traditional folk beliefs and a wider discourse on the mysterious and supernatural were variously reconfigured in the context of Japan’s modernization to serve the consolidation of a nation-state on the one hand and to offer a platform of critique of Japan’s path to modernization on the other. His focus of interest has now moved to issues of tourism and war memorialization in Okinawa, and he has several journal articles in this area. His article “Between War and Tropics: Heritage Tourism in Postwar Okinawa,” appeared in The Public Historian, Vol.30, May 2008. His article in Critical Asian Studies “Waging Peace on Okinawa” (reprinted with additions in Laura Hein & Mark Selden eds. Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power, 2003) was cited as Honorable Mention for Best CAS Article in 2001. He is currently working on a book-length study of postwar Okinawa tourism under the title Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa, a project supported by a Japan Foundation Research Grant (2000-01) and a Social Science Research Council research grant. He has presented sections of this work at many domestic and international fora of Japanese historical and cultural studies.

In addition to these primary fields of research, Professor Figal has, through recent teaching of Japanese anime and cyberpunk literature courses, developed a growing interest in film and media studies, especially in the realm of the intersection of art, technology, and visions of the human.

Figal served six years as Japan Book Review for the Journal of Asian Studie, and was the Acting Director of the East Asian Studies Program in 2005-2006. Arriving at Vanderbilt in 2003, he previously taught at Lewis & Clark College and the University of Delaware.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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