Dr Seth Jacobowitz
American Philosophical Society Fellow, May - June 2025
Home institution: Texas State University
Seth Jacobowitz is the author of Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Harvard Asia Center, 2016), which won the 2017 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Humanities. He is also the translator from Japanese of the Edogawa Rampo Reader (Kurodahan Press, 2008) and from Portuguese of Fernando Morais' Dirty Hearts: The History of Shindo Renmei (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). Currently Assistant Professor of Japanese at Texas State University, he previously taught at Yale and San Francisco State University, and is a frequent Visiting Researcher to the Center of Japanese Studies at the University of São Paulo.
Project title: “The Forensic Turn in Modern Japan: Criminology, the Human Sciences, and Detective Fiction.”
Dr. Jacobowitz will be conducting research at the Institute for a project entitled “The Forensic Turn in Modern Japan: Criminology, the Human Sciences, and Detective Fiction.” It investigates the status of forensics in the era of the Empire of Japan (1868-1945) alongside precedents and concurrent developments in the Anglophone world. His primary objective is not only to reexamine the late nineteenth century introduction of fingerprinting as a fundamental practice in criminology, but also to analyze broader societal impacts from forensic identification methods registered in contemporaneous Japanese and Anglophone detective fiction and crime reportage.