Dean Suttmeier Awarded Franklin Research Grant

Dean of the College and Associate Professor of Japanese Bruce Suttmeier has been awarded a $6,000 Franklin Research Grant by the American Philosophical Society in support of his project, “When Japan Won the War: Historical Contingency and the Counterfactual Imagination”. This project considers the broad and varied production of counterfactual histories, illustrating how analytical and narrative descriptions of unrealized histories serve as intriguing barometers of past and present forms of remembrance. The counterfactual genre is different than revisionist history—it explicitly asks readers to consider the possible consequences of an admittedly false conditional. Franklin grant funds will allow Dr. Suttmeier to travel to Tokyo this summer to conduct archival research at Waseda University and the National Diet Library. Specifically, his three-week study in Japan will focus on early-century imaginative fiction to early 1960s science fiction and early 1990s “war simulation” novels not available in the United States. Dr. Suttmeier recently published an edited-volume chapter on counterfactual narratives of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and this summer’s research will form the basis of a new journal article. He plans to gather this research into a monograph examining Japanese historical speculation. More information about Dr. Suttmeier’s research is available here.