Annika A. Culver

Annika Culver is Associate Professor of East Asian History at Florida State University, where she specializes in Japan and Northeast Asia-related topics, as one of the world's experts on imperial Japan and Manchuria/Manchukuo (Japanese-occupied northeast China). She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago and holds an A.M. degree in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard University and a history degree from Vassar College. Since 2012, Culver has served as a scholar in the US-Japan Network for the Future, a group initiated by the late Ezra Vogel which connects academics to the foreign policy community. She is also an Editorial Board Member of the Texas National Security Review. Culver's research and publications have focused on propaganda and advertising, cultural production in Manchuria/Manchukuo and the Japanese empire, the history of science in Japan, and more recently, the growth of Japanese consumer capitalism. Her publications include Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo (2013), which won the Southeast Conference for the Association for Asian Studies 2015 Book Prize, the co-edited volume Manchukuo Perspectives: Transnational Approaches to Literary Production (2019), and Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology (2022); her most recent book, Democratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan, will be published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2023. The Japan Foundation, Association for Asian Studies, D. Kim Foundation for Science and Technology, and USIIE (Fulbright) and other grants have funded Culver's research. In addition, she regularly gives media and television interviews on East Asian topics, most recently for Voice of America, New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Nikkei News, and regularly presents at national and international venues. Culver is proficient in Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, French, and German.