Emily Cole received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Oregon in 2022. She specializes in modern Japanese history, with a particular interest in postwar photography and visual culture, cultural identity and representation, and social relations of the Allied Occupation of Japan.
Dr. Cole’s current manuscript project, Taking Pictures in Occupied Japan, examines how photographers and magazine editors employed the practice of photography to mediate the social and cultural world of the Japanese in the early postwar period, looking specifically at how they negotiated war defeat, the loss of empire, and a foreign military occupation through their images.
Prior to Boston College, Dr. Cole held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies (Harvard University). Her research has been generously supported by a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow Award, the University of Maryland’s Twentieth-Century Japanese Research Award, a Terasaki Research Travel Grant (UCLA), and by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (University of Oregon).
