Associate Professor Franz Prichard’s interdisciplinary research and teaching explore the literature, environmental thought, and visual media of contemporary Japan. In his first book, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (Columbia University Press, 2019) he explored the ways Japanese writers, artists, and critics reinvented their work in response to Japan’s intensive urbanization. His current research develops transcultural and ecocritical approaches to the study of contemporary Japanese literature and visual media. Weaving together the perspectives of writers, critics, photographers, and artists, among others, this research elaborates ecocritical approaches with a rigorously planetary perspective in pursuit of collaborative ways of knowing the generative relations among humans, animals, material objects, and shared worlds.

Prichard received his PhD from the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA in 2011. Prior to arriving at FSU as an Associate Professor in 2023, Prichard has taught as a lecturer at UCLA, as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and at Princeton University.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Japanese Literary and Visual Media

Environmental Humanities

Photographic Thought and Praxis

Urban Humanities

COURSES TAUGHT

JPT 3392 JAPANESE FILM AND CULTURE “Japan’s Media Mix"

JPT 4934/5935 CONTEMPORARY JAPANESES MEDIA ECOLOGIES

JPT3511 JAPANESE POPULAR CULTURE

JPT 4934/5935 JAPANESE DOCUMENTARY FILM AND MEDIA

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Books

• Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (Columbia University Press, 2019)

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “Seeing Through the In/Visible: Akagi Shūji and the Limits of ‘Environmental Restoration,’” Japanese Studies, August, 2023.
• A Brief Introduction to Nakahira Takuma’s “The Illusion Called the Documentary: From the Document to the Monument,” 1972, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 21, Issue 3, March 31st, 2023. 
• “The Feedback and Noise of Komatsu Hiroko’s Photographic Materialities,” Trans-Asia Photography Review, Vol. 12, No.1, Duke University Press, Spring 2022.
• “An Introduction to Matsuda Masao’s ‘City as Landscape,’” ARTMargins, Vol. 10, no. 1, 2021.

Book Chapters

• “An Invitation to the Critical Literary Urban Vocabularies of 1970s Japan,” in Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies, edited by Lieven Ameel, Routledge, 2022.

Book Reviews

• “William O. Gardner, The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 82, no. 1, June 2022, 165-168.

Essays

• “Matsue Taiji’s Photographic Pedagogy of Unlearning,” (写真による脱学習教育, translated into Japanese by Nakano Tsutomu) in MATSUE TAIJI: makietaCC, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Nov. 9, 2021—Jan. 23, 2022.
• “Komatsu Hiroko’s Photographic Overload,” in Komatsu Hiroko: Creative Destruction, edited by Carrie Cushman, The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Winter 2021.