Akihiro Kitada

Akihiro Kitada (北田 暁大, Kitada Akihiro, born December 28, 1971 in Japan) is a Japanese sociologist and an associate professor at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, University of Tokyo.
He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 2004. Before he took his current position in 2003, he was teaching at the University of Tsukuba. He was a visiting professor at Leipzig University in 2011.
He is one of the most influential sociologists in Japan. His research topics include theoretical sociology, cultural sociology and history of media. He has acquired a reputation for his analysis of advertising, early cinema, magazines, TV, internet and other forms of media in modern and contemporary Japan as well as for his theoretical writings on culture and media. He is known among the reading public in Japan for co-editing the journal Shiso chizu (思想地図) with the cultural critic Hiroki Azuma during its first years.