Christopher Gerteis is a historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan. His research examines the intersection of class, gender, and generation to challenge dominant narratives and highlight marginalized perspectives. Gerteis writes about lived experiences and grassroots voices, perspectives that are frequently excluded from conventional historical narratives. This approach is particularly evident in his analyses of social and political movements where he utilizes historical archives and personal testimonies to explore the margins of political agency in twentieth-century Japan.
Gerteis’ major publications include Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (Harvard, 2010), an interdisciplinary analysis of wage-earning Japanese women contesting normative gender roles within postwar socialist labor movements, and Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (Cornell, 2021), examining class and gender influences on the political consciousness and radicalization of Japanese youth in the 1960s and 1970s.
His recent published work (選択的記憶と戦略的忘却 : 日本における歴史の商品化と産業遺産) explores how industrial heritage sites and museums reflect contested narratives of national pride and imperial violence. He situates Japanese historical developments within broader global contexts, examining complex interactions between local agency and external influences like Cold War geopolitics. In tandem with this line of research, he served as co-PI of the Hashima XR project, which employed Extended Reality (XR) technology to build an open-world experience recreating the Hashima coal mining community (Gunkanjima), a UNESCO World Heritage site.
His current book-in-progress, A Brief History of Japanese Imperialism, responds to an institutional legacy of imperial(ist) historiography by situating the Japanese empire as constitutive of modern state formation rather than as an aberration or reactive policy. The book foregrounds settler colonialism, transregional labor regimes, and the administrative logics that linked domestic reform to colonial governance across East Asia. Emphasizing the concept of “scaled repetition,” it traces how bureaucratic templates developed in Japan’s internal frontiers were exported across imperial territories. The project engages critically with modernization theory and colonial modernity debates, presenting Japanese imperialism as a recursive process embedded in global structures of colonial rule and postwar continuity.
Building on a lifelong interest in the Computational Humanities, Gerteis is also developing tools and methods for designing historiographical video games that convey historical complexity to broader audiences. He publishes 'Past Meets Pixel @ Substack', a resource exploring the intersection of history and video gaming, fostering collaboration among scholars, gamers, designers, and educators.
He is the founding editor of the SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan series, published by Bloomsbury Publishing, and also serves as a Regional Editor (East Asia) for the International Journal of Asian Studies, published by Cambridge University Press. He is a founding member of the editorial board for the series Power Currents: Asian Media in the World published by Pittspurgh University Press.