Education

PhD, Columbia University, 2001

Fields of Interest

Modern and contemporary Japanese history: social, political, and cultural; historical memory; social movements; relations with Asia; global and comparative history

Academic Profile

Professor Seraphim, a historian of modern and contemporary Japan, joined the faculty in 2001. Her work has focused on the contested place of Japan’s empire and war in Asia in postwar politics, society, and culture. Currently, she is researching questions of rehabilitation and citizenship in the politics of social integration and exclusion after World War II in Japan and Germany.

Professor Seraphim offers historical surveys of early modern and modern Japan, as well as of Asia, in global history (as a Core course); topical courses on the Asia-Pacific War and Japanese society since 1945; and seminars on the Allied Occupations of Japan and Germany, the place of memory in history, and comparative and transnational history writing for undergraduates and graduate students.

Representative Publications

• War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2006)
• “Relocating War Memory at Century’s End: Japan’s Postwar Responsibility and Global Public Culture,” in Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter, eds. Ruptured Histories: War and Memory in Post-Cold War Asia (Harvard University Press, 2007)
• “Japan,” in Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (Macmillan Reference USA, 2004)
• “Kriegsverbrecherprozess in Asien und globale Erinnerungskulturen,” in Wolfgang Schwentker, et al., eds. Diktaturen und Kriege im kollektiven Gedächtnis: Italien, Japan, und Deutschland nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Fischer Verlag, 2003)