Paul Kreitman

Assistant Professor,

Columbia University

 

I am currently assistant professor of 20th century Japanese history in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. My research interests include the environmental history of Japan, science, technology and society studies, and the global history of sovereignty since the 19th century (with particular reference to island disputes).

 

I received my PhD from Princeton in 2015 with a dissertation titled “Feathers, Fertilizer and States of Nature: Uses of Albatrosses in the U.S.-Japan Borderlands”. I am currently revising this into a monograph with the working title of Japan’s Desert Islands: Nature and Sovereignty Conservation. My second project, tentatively titled Excremental Modernity, explores the political ecology of excrement in 20th century urban and peri-urban Japan. An excerpt from this, published in the journal Environmental History, is titled “Attacked by Excrement: the political ecology of shit in wartime and postwar Tokyo”.