Todd Joseph Miles Holden (also known as T.J.M. Holden and Todd Holden) is an American-born social scientist, essayist, philosopher, and novelist. He was the first tenured foreign professor at Tohoku University, one of Asia’s elite universities, where he taught for 26 years. His scholarship has been multi- and trans-disciplinary, embracing globalization, media studies, cultural studies, semiotics, advertising, television, Japanese popular culture, sociology, cultural anthropology, political communication, gender, identity, and digital youth. Between 2000 and 2009 he was a contributor to the international webzine PopMatters, writing a regular column on Japanese popular culture called ReDotPop, and creating PM’s first blog, Peripatetic Postcards. In 2011 he published a book by the same name, bearing the subtitle "the journey of life through 25 of the world's cities". Recent work has included literary treatments of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, dystopia, philosophical detection, comedy and caper.
Academic background Holden received his BA in Social Ecology from the University of California, Irvine, and his PhD in Interdisciplinary Social Science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. At UCI, he was strongly influenced by Ralph (Ray) Catalano and worked with Larry Agran, who went on to become Mayor of Irvine and, later, candidate for President of the United States. At Syracuse he was mentored by John A. Agnew, who oversaw his dissertation, along with Ralph Ketcham and Thomas E. Patterson. Other important influences were Barry Glassner, then-chair of the sociology department, and Robert Bogdan, whose approach to ethnography and qualitative content analysis have been apparent in Holden's scholarship.
Administrative career Upon obtaining his PhD, in 1988, Holden was recruited by Tohoku University, the third oldest of Japan's so-called “Imperial Universities", and one of Asia's top-ranked universities. His initial post was lecturer in the Department of English in the (now-defunct) College of General Education. Thereafter, he taught in the Department of Social Structure and Change in the Graduate School of Information Sciences and was an associate professor of society and culture at the (now-defunct) School of Language and Culture. In 2001 he was appointed professor of mediated sociology in the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies (GSICS), becoming the first foreigner to secure tenure at Tohoku University since its establishment in 1907. Twice Chair of the Department of Multi-Cultural Societies, he helped build a small, but dynamic graduate program on media, culture and society. He retired in 2014 after nearly 27 years of service. In 2000 Holden served on the planning committee of Tohoku University's "International Symposium on Research and Education in the 21st Century," (ISRE 2000), an assembly that led to exchange agreements with 29 universities and 114 university departments from 31 nations. In 2005 he was part of the working group that designed the so-called Internet School (ISTU), the university's first step toward establishing a distance education program. In 2008 he was a visiting lecturer in geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, teaching a course on sports globalization; in 2013, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, working on "Ukiyo-ad", a book on Japanese advertising, cultural communication and media theory. During his career, Holden held executive positions in various international professional associations, including two terms (8 years) as chair of the Gender and Communication section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), 4 years as vice-president of the Asia-Pacific Sociology Association (APSA), and 4 years as executive committee member of Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ). He also served as webmaster and communications director for all three of these associations.
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