Our Directors

Osamu James Nakagawa

Director

Osamu James Nakagawa is the Ruth N. Halls Distinguished Professor of Photography at Indiana, where he directs the Center for Integrative Photographic Studies. He was named the 2010 Higashikawa New Photographer of the Year and the 2015 Sagamihara Photographer of the Year. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago. He is best known for his Okinawa trilogy, a series of works that address the legacy of WWII in Japan. Other major works include Madeo, Drive in Theater, and May 15s. He has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Houston Center for Photography, the American Photography Institute, and the Tisch School of Arts.

Christoph Irmscher

Associate Director

Christoph Irmscher has taught at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Harvard University, and the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Since 2006, he has been at Indiana University of Bloomington, where he is the Provost Professor of English and the George F. Getz Jr. Professor in the Wells Scholars Program. He also directs the Wells Scholars Program. He is the author of several books, on subjects ranging from natural history writing (The Poetics of Natural History, 1999) to the life of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Longfellow Redux, published in paperback in 2008, and Public Poet, Private Man, 2009). His recent biography of the 19th-century scientist Louis Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, was Editor's Choice of the New York Times Book Review in February 2013. Christoph's new biography of the writer, editor, and activist Max Eastman, Ask No Thing of God or King: Max Eastman's Century, will be published by Yale University Press in 2017. He is represented by the Stuart Literary Agency.