Christopher Gerteis is a historian of modern and contemporary Japan whose research examines the intersection of class, gender, generation, and governance in twentieth-century Japanese society. Working across institutional archives, government records, and mass-media sources in Japanese and English, his scholarship treats administrative and journalistic documents not as transparent records of social conditions but as artifacts of the classificatory practices through which the state and non-state actors sought to produce governable populations.
His two single-authored monographs trace this analytical problem across different domains of postwar life. Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Press, 2010) reconstructed how male-dominated labour unions systematically excluded women workers from full membership while deploying the language of solidarity; it received the European Association for Japanese Studies Second Prize Book Award in 2011. Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (Cornell University Press, 2021) examined how Cold War institutions — state agencies, political parties, and corporate philanthropies — constructed the postwar generation as both a problem and a resource; it received the SOAS Best Book Award in 2022. A substantially revised Japanese-language edition is forthcoming from the University of Tokyo Press in 2026.
Two articles published in 2026 extend this programme in new directions. "Engines of Deviance: Newspapers, Traffic Cops, and Youth Rebellion in 1970s Japan" (International Journal of Asian Studies) analyses how press standardisation, police reclassification, and legal authorisation jointly produced bōsōzoku (暴走族) as a discrete, governable category between 1972 and 1979. "Writing Against the Machine: Computational Authorship and Historical Writing" (History, journal of the Historical Association) argues that historical knowledge is constituted through the act of composition — a process that resists reduction to prediction or pattern-matching — and examines the implications of large language model adoption for the discipline. A textbook, Japan's Unfinished Empire: Colonies, Capital, and the Afterlives of Imperialism, is currently under review at Bloomsbury.
Gerteis serves as Co-General Editor of A Cultural History of East Asia (6 vols., Bloomsbury, 2026–2028), with Nakajima Takahiro, a project that reframes East Asian history as a relational and globally situated field across six chronological volumes. He is Founding Series Editor of SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury) and Regional Editor for East Asia of the International Journal of Asian Studies (Cambridge University Press).
His public-facing and digital humanities work centres on the Simulating Silence project, which documents the institutional obstruction of HashimaXR — a VR reconstruction of the coal-mining community on Hashima Island (軍艦島) — as a case study in how heritage governance silences contested histories. The project received funding from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, and SOAS, and attracted coverage in the Asahi Shimbun and Nagasaki Shimbun. He publishes two Substack platforms — Japanese Modernity and Past Meets Pixel — extending this work for public audiences. He is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Japanese History at SOAS University of London, where he convenes the MA programmes in East Asian Studies.
Research interests
His research focuses on the social and cultural history of Japan since the nineteenth century, with particular attention to how classificatory practices — embedded in legal codes, institutional procedures, and journalistic conventions — produce and stabilise governable social categories. His work treats the archive as evidence of organizational logic rather than transparent social record, and is especially concerned with the governance of labour, youth, gender, and postcolonial memory across the twentieth century.
Current projects include a book-in-progress, Japan's Unfinished Empire: Colonies, Capital, and the Afterlives of Imperial Governance, which situates the Japanese empire as constitutive of modern state formation rather than as an aberration or reactive policy. The project foregrounds settler colonialism, transregional labour, and administrative logics that linked domestic reform to colonial governance, emphasizing the recursive "scaled repetition" of imperial techniques across domestic and colonial spaces.
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, a VR reconstruction of the coal-mining community on Hashima Island (端島) using Extended Reality technologies. Further publications on this project are forthcoming.
Alongside this, he is developing new work in the computational humanities. He publishes Past Meets Pixel and Japanese Modernity on Substack, fostering collaborations among scholars, developers, and educators in rethinking how historical knowledge is produced and shared. He supervises doctoral projects in the fields of labour, gender, youth culture, media, memory, and postcolonial empire, and welcomes interdisciplinary projects bridging historical scholarship with cultural studies and digital humanities.
Research awards and fellowships
- Fulbright Faculty Research Fellow, Japan-United States Educational Commission and the Senator J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (2008–2009).
- Project Associate Professor, University of Tokyo, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (2019–2024).
- Research Grant, Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, and SOAS University of London, supporting the Hashima XR Project (2022).
- Writing Support Fellowship, Karl Jaspers Center for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg (2014, 2018).
- Research Fellowship, German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, International Research Centre: Work and Human Life Course in Global History, Humboldt University of Berlin (2015–2016).
- Research-in-Residence Fellowship, Japanese Ministry of Education, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (2016–2017).
- Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellowship, Yale University, Council on East Asian Studies (2005–2006).
- Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Ōhara Institute for Social Research, Hōsei University, Tokyo (2001–2002).
- Doctoral Research Fellowship, Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), Meiji University, Tokyo (1997–1999).
Editorial roles
- Co-General Editor, A Cultural History of East Asia (6 vols., Bloomsbury, 2026–2028), with Nakajima Takahiro.
- Founding Series Editor, SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury, 2013–2026).
- 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–).
Prizes and recognition
- SOAS Research and Knowledge Exchange Prizes, for Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (Cornell University Press, 2021), 2022.
- Second Prize Book Award, European Association for Japanese Studies, for Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Press, 2009), 2011.
- Joint Runner-Up, Director's Teaching Prize, SOAS University of London, 2010.
Visiting professorships
- Five-Year Project Associate Professorship, University of Tokyo, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, 2019–2024.
- Visiting Research Professor of Japanese History, Program for Japan Studies in Global Contexts, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2016–2017.
- Visiting Professor and Chair of Cultural Economic History, Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, 2014.
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.
- Invited Panelist, "Publishing in Scholarly Journals on Japan," AAS President's Panel, Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, DC, 2018.
- Invited Panelist, EAJS Presidential Panel, "The NYK Story: Manufacturing a Modern Maritime History for Contemporary Japan," Triennial Meeting of the European Association for Japanese Studies, Tallinn, Estonia, 2011.
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.