History Department Faculty
Franziska Seraphim
Associate Professor
Director of Asian Studies
Franziska Seraphim
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall Room S337
Telephone: 617-552-2142
Email: franziska.seraphim@bc.edu
ORCID 0000-0002-5075-2353
Education
- Ph.D., Columbia University
Research Interests
Modern and contemporary Japanese history: social, political, and cultural; historical memory; social movements; relations with Asia; global and comparative history
Expertise
- Japan
- War, Revolution, & Memory
- History
- Social & Rights Movements
Department
Biography
Professor Seraphim is a historian of modern and contemporary Japan and the Director of the Asian Studies Program. Her work has focused on the contested place of Japan’s empire and war in Asia in postwar politics, society, and culture. She is currently writing a social history of the Allied transitional justice program after World War II from a global and comparative perspective. Titled Geographies of Justice, it relates the different spatialities of the program and its transformation through the 1940s and 1950s through the lens of Japanese and German war criminals' prisons, from their vast spread across Asia and Europe to the dynamics within the American-run jails in Tokyo and Landsberg (Bavaria) and the (inter)national politics of clemency.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
“Carceral Geographies of Japan’s Vanishing Empire: War Criminals Prisons in Asia” in Barak Kushner, ed. The Dismantling of the Japanese Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, Postwar Legitimacy, and Imperial Afterlife. Routledge, 2016, pp. 125-145.
“A ‘Penologic Program’ for Japanese and German War Criminals after World War II” in Joanne Cho, Lee Roberts, and Christian Spang, eds. Transnational Encounters and Comparisons between Germany and Japan, 1860s-2000s. Palgrave, 2015, pp. 185-206.
“The Hanaoka Massacre in History and Memory” in Mikyoung Kim, ed. Routledge Handbook of Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia. Routledge, 2015. Also: "The Hanaoka Massacre--a story in woodcuts" in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Vol. 13, Issue 26, No. 3 (June 29, 2015). http://www.japanfocus.org/-Franziska-Seraphim/4337/article.html.
“A New Social History of Occupied Japan,” Review essay in Journal of Asian Studies v. 73, no. 1 (Feb, 2014), pp. 187-198.
“Visual Cultures of Memory in Modern Japan: the historical uses of Japanese art collections” Chapter 5 in Joan Tumblety, ed. Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject (Routledge Guides to Using Historical Sources). Routledge, 2013, pp. 88-106.
“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. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 15-46.