Tristan Grunow

Tristan Grunow's picture
Visiting Associate Research Scholar in East Asian Studies (July 2019 - June 2020)
Areas of interest : 
Modern Japanese History; Urban History; Colonial Urban Planning and Architecture; Environmental and Spatial History; Imperialism, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism
Region: 
Japan

My book manuscript, Empire by Design: Tokyo and the Building of Japanese Modernity, charts the respacing of the built environment of Tokyo under the process of Japanese state-formation and empire-building.  My most recent publication is “Paving Power: Western Urban Planning and Imperial Space from the Streets of Meiji Tokyo to Colonial Seoul” published in the Journal of Urban History in 2016.  Other publications include “Trains, Modernity, and State-Formation in Meiji Japan” and “A Re-examination of the ‘Shock of Hiroshima’: The Japanese Bomb Projects and the Surrender Decision.”

In 2017-2018, I organized and hosted the UBC Meiji at 150 Project with the collaboration of colleagues in the Centre for Japanese Research, Department of Asian Studies, the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, and the Asian Library at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

As part of this project I co-curated, edited, and constructed the Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource, compiling over a dozen visual essays by scholars from Japan and North America highlighting digitized materials related to Japanese history at UBC.

I also host and produce the ongoing Meiji at 150 Podcast, featuring interviews with prominent scholars of Japanese history, literature, and cultural studies from around the globe.