Jun Tanaka is Professor of art and intellectual history in the department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo. Born in Miyagi (Japan) in 1960. Ph.D. in art history from the University of Tokyo. Areas of expertise: European, especially German avant-garde art and literature in the years between the two world wars (Kurt Schwitters, Gilbert Clavel), history of modern architecture (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Adolf Loos), theory and praxis of urban imagination (urban poetics of modern art and literature: Passagenwerk by Walter Benjamin, Aldo Rossi’s architecture, W.G. Seebald, Japanese poets, painters and photographers), a comparative intellectual history of political aesthetics (Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Carl Schmitt, Yukio Mishima, Bunso Hashikawa, Otto Höfler, Georges Dumézil, Giuseppe Terragni), biographical and theoretical research on Aby Warburg, especially on his picture-atlas Mnemosyne.