I am a historian of modern Japan and its colonial empire. I’m currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. My first book, The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region, is published by California University Press (December 2025). I received my Ph.D in History from Harvard University in 2018, where I was awarded the Harold K. Gross Dissertation Prize.

Before joining the Yale faculty in 2021, I was Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

I started out my academic life reading lots of Victorian literature and Old English at Somerville College, University of Oxford, where I got my BA.

After finishing my undergraduate degree I spent two years as an Assistant Language Teacher at Kurume Commercial High School, in Fukuoka prefecture, Japan, which is where my interest in Japan’s—especially Fukuoka’s—modern history began.

I then studied for a Master’s in Japanese Studies at SOAS, University of London, and returned to Fukuoka on a MEXT scholarship, thanks to which I was able to study as a Research Scholar at Kyushu University for two years.

My research interests focus on modern Japan and its colonial empire, with an emphasis on the connected twentieth-century histories of imperial expansion, urban growth, and movement of peoples between Japan and Korea.

At Yale, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on modern Japanese history, Korea and the Japanese Empire, the global history of colonial and imperial cities, and the history of World War Two in Asia.