Comparative politics, international relations, Asian studies, comparative immigration and citizenship regimes, rural sustainability in Japan

Tegtmeyer Pak earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, and her B.A. in East Asian Studies and Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Between college and graduate school she worked at Toshiba Corporation’s Tokyo headquarters for two years; she returned to Japan for sixteen months of field research during graduate school.  Before joining the St. Olaf faculty in 2003, she taught for five years at New College of Florida.  Tegtmeyer Pak teaches both broad international/comparative politics classes (Imagining Global Democracies, Immigration and Citizenship) and Asia-focused classes (Asian Regionalism, Human Rights in Asian Contexts).  She has published several papers on Japanese immigration and citizenship politics.  She spent the 2009-10 academic year as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, thanks to a Fulbright Research Grant, investigating democratic ideals and political socialization. Her current research project is Pragmatic Utopians: Environmental Sustainability in Japan, a born-digital, multimedia resource, argues that we can enhance environmental sustainability through understanding those who already practice sustainable lifestyles, because they model particular local actions suited to specific ecological and sociocultural contexts that may generate  large-scale changes reinforced by markets and policies. This co-authored book combines mini-documentaries, interactive national and local maps of Japan, photography, a curated guide to relevant Japanese government data sets, narrative text and analytical commentary.