Seiji M. Lippit received his A.B. in literature from Harvard University and his PhD in Japanese literature from Columbia University. He teaches courses on modern literature and film. His research interests include modernism, mass culture, urban space, minority literature, as well as representations of decolonization, occupation, and the transformation of national consciousness in postwar Japan. His publications include Topographies of Japanese Modernism (Columbia UP, 2002), an examination of modernist fiction in the 1920s and 30s, and the edited volume The Essential Akutagawa (Marsilio, 1999), an anthology of writings by the celebrated writer Akutagawa Ryûnosuke. He is currently working on a book project on literature of the immediate postwar period that focuses on representations of urban space in the wake of empire’s collapse.