Franz Prichard’s research and teaching explore the literature, visual media, and critical thought of contemporary Japan. He is interested in the provocative forms of exchange among works of criticism, fiction, film and photography that offer vivid perspectives on urban materiality and ecological transformation. Prior to arriving at Princeton, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. 

His first book, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan(link is external), Columbia University Press, 2019, examines the rapid transformation of the urban and media ecologies of Japanese literary and visual media of the 1960s and 70s. This interdisciplinary study offers an in-depth account of the critical perspectives of filmmakers, writers, and artists who wrought novel aesthetic vocabularies from the intensive urbanization of the archipelago to question the Cold War remaking of Japan. Mapping the shifting relationships among urban materialities and subjectivities across works of documentary, fiction, and photography, his book illuminates the urban ecologies and the infrastructural aesthetics at the heart of the Cold War in East Asia and worldwide.