I am currently associate professor of 20th century Japanese history in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. My research interests include Japanese history, Pacific history, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and the global history of sovereignty since the 19th century.

I received my PhD from Princeton in 2015, and since then my writing has appeared in various venues. My article “Attacked by Excrement: The Political Ecology of Shit in Wartime and Postwar Tokyo” was published in the journal Environmental History in 2018 and won the Association for the Study of Environmental History’s Leopold-Hidy Prize for that year. A revised version of my doctoral dissertation was published by Cambridge University Press in July 2023 under the title Japan’s Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty. And my next monograph project explores the history of trans-Pacific border controls with a focus on the Hawaiian archipelago in particular. My writing has also appeared in The Financial Times, The Japan Times, Asahi Shimbun, Tōyō Keizai Online, The Diplomat and The New Statesman. I also occasionally experiment with Youtube.

At Columbia I teach a range of survey courses on Japanese history, as well as upper-level courses on “Asian Mobilities” and “Troubled Islands of the Indo-Pacific” and graduate seminars on “Borderland Japan” and “Science, Environment and Technology in Japanese History”. Before coming to Columbia I was a junior research fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, a senior teaching fellow at SOAS, and a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Asia. In a previous life I worked as a carbon offset consultant at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities in Tokyo, accrediting greenhouse gas emission reduction projects under the Kyoto Protocol.

Bird hunting on the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, 1939