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Much of my work grows out of an interest in reconstructing the worldviews of non-elite actors from the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. With a regional focus on the Asia-Pacific world, I have written extensively on different aspects of Japanese migration history: on what it meant to be mobile in the modern world; on settler colonial history both within the colonies of the Japanese empire and beyond; on labour and environmental histories within the Pacific sugar plantation economy; and on the archival and methodological challenges of recovering such histories.
Published in 2012, my first book worked back from a local dispute in the 1980s to understand how the townspeople of one municipality in western Japan came to believe that building a nuclear power station would be a panacea for socioeconomic problems that dated from the late-nineteenth century. This brought me to the topic of how to write global histories of migration from the perspective of people who remained at home. My second book (2023) then followed the migrants themselves, focusing on a single Japanese steamship during its voyages to Hawai‘i, Southeast Asia and Australia during the Meiji period (1868-1912). This raised the challenge of archival recovery—and so the book also turned into a discussion of global history methodologies in a digital age. My current work is located at the intersection of global history and Indigenous Studies; I hope to study maritime aspects of Japanese settler colonialism within the framework of British and US imperialism more generally.
since 2021 | Co-Director of the Department of History |
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since 2020 | Editorial Board Member of Past & Present |
since 2015 | Chair for Global History (18th to 20th centuries, with a focus on Asia), University of Zurich, Switzerland |
2012–2014 | Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow, Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context", University of Heidelberg, Germany |
2008–2014 | Lecturer in Modern Japanese History, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, UK |
2008 | DPhil History, University of Oxford, UK (St. Antony's College) |
2003–2005 | MEXT-funded research student, Kyushu University, Japan |
2002 | MA Japanese Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK |
1998 | MA and BA Modern History, University of Oxford, UK (Trinity College) |