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.
He was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA) and the University of Iowa, Iowa City (MA, PhD), and also undertook graduate study at Meiji University in Tokyo. Before joining SOAS in 2009, he held postdoctoral fellowships at Hōsei University's Ōhara Institute for Social Research and at the Yale University Council on East Asian Studies, and spent a year as a Fulbright Faculty Fellow at Sophia University in Tokyo. From 2019 to 2024, he was Project Associate Professor of Japanese History at the University of Tokyo's Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia. He has also held research appointments at Humboldt University of Berlin, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and the University of Heidelberg.
Christopher supervises doctoral projects on the history of modern Japan, especially in the fields of labor, gender, youth culture, media, memory, and postcolonial empire. He welcomes interdisciplinary projects bridging historical scholarship with cultural studies and digital humanities.
Research interests
His research focuses on the social and cultural history of Japan since the nineteenth century. His work emphasizes how class, gender, and generation shaped the formation of political consciousness and collective identity. His major publications include Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (Harvard, 2010), which won Second Prize in the European Association for Japanese Studies Book Award, and Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (Cornell, 2021), which received the SOAS Best Book Award in 2022. His next book, 戦後青年と過激主義―冷戦下の政治意識 [Postwar Youth and Radicalism: Political Consciousness during the Cold War], is in press with the University of Tokyo Press and scheduled for publication in 2026.
His recent work includes the article 「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」 [Selective Memory and Strategic Forgetting: The Commodification of History and Industrial Heritage in Japan], published in the 『東洋文化研究所紀要』 [Bulletin of the Institute of Oriental Culture] (vol. 186, 2024). This line of research builds on his role as co-PI of the Hashima XR Project, which was to recreate the Hashima coal mining community (Gunkanjima) through Extended Reality technologies. Further publications on this project are forthcoming.
His book-in-progress, A Brief History of Japanese Imperialism, responds to an institutional legacy of imperialist historiography by situating the Japanese empire as constitutive of modern state formation rather than as an aberration or reactive policy. The project foregrounds settler colonialism, transregional labor, and administrative logics that linked domestic reform to colonial governance, emphasizing the recursive "scaled repetition" of imperial techniques across domestic and colonial spaces.
Alongside this, he is developing new work in the computational humanities. He publishes Past Meets Pixel @ Substack, exploring the intersection of history and video games, and Japanese Modernity @ Substack, focusing on historiography, memory, and global contexts. Both platforms foster collaborations among scholars, developers, and educators in rethinking how historical knowledge is produced and shared.
Research awards and fellowships
Christopher was a Fulbright Faculty Research Fellow (2008–2009) and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellow (2001–2002). His work has also been supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (2015–2016) for research-in-residence at Humboldt University of Berlin, and by the Japanese Ministry of Education (2016–2017) for research-in-residence at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. He was awarded writing support fellowships by the University of Heidelberg's Karl Jaspers Center for Transcultural Studies (2014, 2018). In 2022, he received grants from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, and SOAS University of London to support the Hashima XR Project, and from 2019 to 2024, his research was funded by the University of Tokyo's Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia.
Editorial roles
- Founding Series Editor, SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury, 2012–).
- Executive Editor, International Journal of Asian Studies (2019–2024).
- Chief Editor, Japan Forum (2014–2019).
- International Editorial Board Member, Japan Forum (2019–).
- Editorial Board Member, Power Currents: Asian Media in the World (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024–).
Invited talks / keynotes
- Keynote Speaker, "Serious Video Game Design for the Digital Humanities," Annual Conference of the Center for a Chinese Cultural Metaverse, National Chengchi University of Taiwan, Taipei, 9 December 2023.
- "Doing Digital Scholarship in the Age of the Metaverse," Academic Frontier Lecture Series, Global Focus on Knowledge, University of Tokyo, 17 June 2022.
- Guest Lecturer, "Research Methods and Publishing in Japanese Studies," series of seminars, Japan Foundation Collaborative Research Workshop for Aspiring Scholars in Japanese Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (2019-2024).
Panels and workshops convened
- Workshop Convener and Chair, "Japan Forum/Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies Publishing Workshop for Early Career Academics." INALCO, Paris. 15 March 2019.
- Workshop Chair and Discussant, "Japan Forum Publication Workshop on Disability History." Dōshisha University, Kyoto. 17 June 2017.
- Panel Chair and Discussant, "State and Memory," Borders of Memory Conference. Kyushu University, Japan. 17–18 December 2016.
- Panel Chair and Discussant, European Forum on Korean-Japanese History. Brussels, Belgium. 18–20 December 2015.
- Panel Chair and Discussant, UFSP–GEAS Publication Workshop. University of Zurich, Switzerland. 13–15 December 2015.
- Panel Chair, "Changing Institutions in Japanese Studies," Engaging with Japanese Studies: Revisiting the Question as to Why Japan Matters. Nissan Institute, Oxford University, UK. 14–15 March 2013.