Filippo Gradi is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in modern Japanese and global history. His dissertation analyzes the political history of suffrage and elections in Imperial Japan from the late 1910s through wartime, using social, institutional, and intellectual perspectives in a transnational context. In particular, it tackles the rise of mass politics, the ideology of political movements, the parties’ electoral strategies, the bureaucracy's electoral management, the women’s movement, the colonial empire, the shift to authoritarianism, and the wartime mass mobilization.

More broadly, his interests include 20^th century Japanese and global politics, the transnational movement of knowledge and ideas, and the history of political thought. His general exam fields focused on modern and early modern Japanese history, modern global history, and Japanese religion. He has conducted research in Tokyo, based at Teikyo University, with a Japan Foundation fellowship.