Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2007
phone: 404-413-5111
email: dgainty@gsu.edu
Denis Gainty received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 2007. His work investigates how social and biological bodies are envisioned and experienced in the context of modern nations and nationalisms. Rather than considering bodies as defined and limited by social forces, his work asks how bodies and embodiment comprise an important medium for local agency in modern nation-building through physical education, sports, martial arts, and other articulations of physical culture.
As a visiting lecturer from 2007 at Georgia State, he taught undergraduate World History and East Asian History survey courses. As assistant professor of history, he has added upper-level and graduate courses in world history and historiography, transnational encounters, history of the body, and pedagogy to his bag of tricks.
He is president of the Southeast World History Association for the 2012-2014 term and serves on the editorial board of the World History Bulletin, one of two major publications of the World History Association. His publications include a chapter in The Body in Asia (Berghahn Books, 2009), two chapters in a forthcoming collection of essays on premodern and early modern Japan, translations of Japanese articles and book chapters, and a world history reader. His first monograph, under contract with Routledge, explores the meaning of martial arts for Japanese visions of nation and state in the late Meiji era.
He lives in Decatur with his wife, children, and unselfconsciously fuzzy dog.
