Jun.-Prof. Dr. Fynn Holm

Fynn Holm is Junior Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Tübingen. His research focuses on environmental and social history of Japan from the 17th to the 20th century. He studied, history, law, and Japanese studies at the Universities of Basel, Meiji (Tokyo), and Zurich. In 2019, he defended his dissertation on historical Japanese anti-whaling movements at the University of Zurich. His award-winning first book, The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c. 1600-2019, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Holm worked as a research assistant in the Department of Social Science Japanese Studies at the University of Zurich from 2015 to 2020. In 2017-2018, he was a visiting scholar at Tōhoku University in Sendai. 2021-2022, he was an associate scholar at Harvard University funded by an Early Postdoctoral Mobility Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Prior to his appointment at the University of Tübingen, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Economic, Social and Environmental History at the University of Bern between September 2022 and March 2023. Since September 2024, Holm has been the principal investigator (PI) of the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group 'The Japanese Alpine Empire: A Transnational Environmental History of Japan's 'Alpine' Landscapes'.