Aaron Gerow

Aaron Gerow teaches undergraduate courses in Japanese and East Asian cinema, world animation, film genre, Japanese literature, introduction to film, and close analysis of film, as well as graduate seminars on Japanese film theory and historiography, television, and cultural theory. His book on Kitano Takeshi was published by the BFI in 2007, A Page of Madness came out from the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan in 2008, and Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925, was published in 2010 by the University of California Press (the Japanese version will be coming out from the University of Tokyo Press). He also co-authored the Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies with Markus Nornes (Center for Japanese Studies, 2009), which has recently come out in Japanese in an updated edition. His edited anthology of Japanese prewar film theory, Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory, was published in Japanese in 2018. He has also published numerous articles in English, Japanese and other languages on such topics as Japanese early cinema, film and television theory, contemporary directors, film genre, censorship, Japanese literature and manga, colonial-era Korean film, and cinematic representations of minorities. He received a PhD in Communication Studies from Iowa in 1996 and spent nearly 12 years in Japan, where he was an associate professor at Yokohama National University, in addition to working for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and teaching at Meiji Gakuin University. He is currently working on a book about the history of Japanese film theory.