Teaching Fellows

Alex Jania is an historian and practitioner of disaster memorialization. Specializing in modern Japan, he is interested in how memory, public space, and ritual are used to preserve and communicate disaster history to various audiences. His first project connects the fields of environmental history, memory studies and public history by examining the memorialization of key seismic disasters in 20th and 21st century Japan. He argues these Japanese disaster memorials provide models of public disaster history that could be utilized in response to the climate crisis. Jania earned his MA in Interdisciplinary East Asian Studies (2015) from The Ohio State University and PhD in History (2022) from the University of Chicago.