My work as a historian is focused on understanding how different complex phenomena with potentially profound social effects – economic collapse, earthquake disasters, the problematic accumulation of wealth – have been experienced and responded to in modern Japan. The first of that project’s two main goals is to show that the many contingencies around emerging forms of knowledge production shaped what average people and experts alike came to believe about these hazards, their implications, and what it might be possible to do about them. The second is to uncover in people’s responses to these phenomena arguments and ideas about where modern Japanese society ought to be headed. I pursued both goals in my first book, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression and Rural Revitalization, and they have continued to inform my work since.
Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan is the first English-language monograph to focus on disaster as an ongoing condition in modern Japan, and the first to consider the role of scientists as mediators of the public’s understanding of the hazards and risks the nation faced. Built on extensive archival work conducted in Japan and the U.S., the book draws on an unusual variety of sources in the popular press, broadcasting, film, scientific journals, scientists’ memoirs and personal papers, and conversations with key figures in the post-1970s debates over earthquake prediction in Japan. Predicting Disasters argues that catastrophes - and earthquake disasters in particular - shaped the trajectory of modern Japanese history in ways that we are only just beginning to recognize. I show how attention to disaster as a process, and not just as a series of discrete, disruptive episodes, brings to light ideas, anxieties and plans for the future that manifest themselves in the spaces between major catastrophic events.
2016-17 Residential Fellowship, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (MPIWG, Department III, Artefacts, Action, and Knowledge) and The International Consortium for Research in the Humanities at the Friedrich- Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (IKGF), for work in a joint project on Accounting for Uncertainty: Prediction and Planning in Asia’s History.
1998 - 1999 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars
1992 - 1993 Harvard University Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, Supplemental Dissertation Grant
1991 - 1992 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
1990 - 1991 Institute of International Education (IIE) Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship
"Building the Model Village: Rural Revitalization and the Great Depression," in Ann Waswo and Nishida Yoshiaki, eds. Farmers and Village Life in 20th Century Japan. RoutledgeCurzon Press, 2003.
"The Showa Hall: Memorializing Japan's War at Home." The Public Historian, 24:4 (Fall 2002):35-64.
A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization. Harvard East Asian monographs; 191. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center : Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2001. Released in paperback edition, 2003.
"Ryotaisen kanki no shakaishi no shutsugen," (The Emergence of A Social History of Interwar Japan) Gendai Nihon shi, no. 6 (2000), pp. 348-367.
"A Land of Milk and Honey: Rural Revitalization in the 1930s," in Gail Lee Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Nakai, eds. Public Sphere, Private Lives. Harvard East Asia Monographs, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center : Distributed by Harvard University Press, August 2005.
