I am currently Unson Microcollege Program Director at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. 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 2016 have taught and researched in various capacities at Columbia: the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Department of History, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. 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 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 Japan and 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 have taught a range of survey courses on Japanese history, as well as upper-level courses on “Asian Mobilities,” “Japan 1968”, “Troubled Islands of the Indo-Pacific” and graduate seminars on “Borderland Japan” and “Science, Environment and Technology in Japanese History”. In partnership with the Unson Foundation in Itoshima I am currently developing a new microcollege summer program built around place-based learning, community engagement and self-governance. The pilot program is expected to launch in summer 2026.

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