Michael Fisch

About

Contact Information

Office: Haskell Mezz 134
Phone: (773) 702-2128
Email: mfisch@uchicago.edu
Website: n/a

(PhD, Columbia University, 2008), Assistant Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, is a social anthropologist with specializations in media studies, communication, and science and technology studies. He is interested in modernity in Japan from the perspective of the evolution of mass mediated society, circa 1900, and the development of mass society theory. His work in these areas forms the theoretical underpinning for his research into new media and new forms of social organization and political representation. Fisch is currently working on a book entitled An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo’s Commuter Train Network, which examines the lived experience of the commuter train network in Tokyo from the postwar to the present as an instantiation of a contemporary technosocial condition.

Selected Publications

Year Title / Publications PDF
n.d. Between the Lines: An Anthropology of Love, Labor and Death in Japan’s Commuter Train Network. (Book manuscript in progress).
2013 Meditations on the “Unimaginable” (soteigai) in Golani Solomon, Erez, Editor. The Space of Disaster. Tel-Aviv, Resling Publishing PDF
n.d “Days of Love and Labor”: Remediating the Logic of Labor and Debt in Contemporary Japan Under Review
2013 Tokyo Commuter Train Suicides and the Society of Emergence. Cultural Anthropology, May 2013, vol. 28:12 PDF
2010 Ringu/The Ring: Tracing the Analog Spirit in a Digital Era. Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media. July 18, 2010. PDF
2009 War by Metaphor in Densha otoko. MECHADEMIA 4: WAR/TIME (November 2009): 131-146. PDF
2004 Murakami Haruki’s Sputnik Sweetheart: Technology, (Mis)communication and the ‘Other Side’. Japan Forum. 16(3): 361-383. PDF
2004 Resistance in the IDF: An Instance of Social Transformation in Israel. Israel Studies Forum, 19(2): 108-126.
2001 The Rise of the Chapel Wedding in Japan: Simulation and Performance. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 28 (1-2): 57-76. PDF