Sean O'Reilly is Professor of Global Connectivity and Coordinator of the Japan Studies program at Akita International University. A graduate of Harvard University's History and East Asian Languages doctoral program, he completed a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. His research, which began with a Fulbright Scholarship to Japan, concerns the ways Japanese history has been reinvented in film and popular culture. Publications include Re-viewing the Past: The Uses of History in the Cinema of Imperial Japan (Bloomsbury, 2018) and "The Resurgent Right: The Secret of Japan's Twenty-first Century Cinematic Success" (Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2023).