I received my PhD in modern Japanese history from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2011. My PhD advisor and continued mentor and friend is Sabine Frühstück. I also studied with and learned a great deal from Luke Roberts, Paul Spickard, Mary Hancock and anne-elise lewallen. My dissertation research was funded by Fulbright IIE, Japan Foundation, and the University of California Pacific Rim Research program. I conducted my research for my dissertation for a year and a half at the University of Tokyo (情報学環) under Professor Yoshimi Shun'ya.

After receiving my PhD I had a two year postdoc as the Asian Studies fellow at Hamilton College in upstate New York. In 2013 I joined the Department of History at Adelphi University in New York. My research interests include Japanese empire and imperialism, Indigenous people (specifically Ainu, Okinawans, Micronesians and Indigenous Taiwanese), visual culture, the Asia-Pacific War, and comparative empires and imperialisms. After publishing Lost Histories in 2019 with Harvard University Asia Center, I have started to work on my second book tentatively titled:  The disorder of killing: the Japanese empire during World War II. I recently received a fellowship from the National Endowment for Humanities and Japan United States Friendship Commission (JUSFC) which supported the research and writing of this book in 2023-2024. It aims to tell a new history of the Asia-Pacific War by looking at Japan's colonial soldiers, forced laborers and the local people co-opted into working for the Japanese military throughout various battle sites, including the Philippines, New Guinea, Saipan, Okinawa, and Japan after defeat and into the occupation period.

For more on my research interests relating to Okinawa see my profile on the Okinawa Collection's Spotlight on Scholars page at George Washington University library. 

My course offerings include:

World Civilizations I and II, History of East Asia I and II, The Asia-Pacific War: Regarding the Pain of Others, A Modern History of Japan: From  Samurai to Salaryman, Atomic history from Hiroshima to Fukushima, Senior Seminar in Asian Studies, and On the Hell that is War, a seminar course for the Honors College at Adelphi.

Using Format