Biography

I am a historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan. As a scholar, I am particularly interested in the history of class and gender. My current research centers on developing methods and tools for designing historiographical video games that convey the complexity of history to audiences who do not typically engage with historical scholarship.

I am the founding editor of the book series SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan for Bloomsbury Publishing and a Regional Editor for the International Journal of Asian Studies published by Cambridge University Press. I publish 'Past Meets Pixel @ Substack' (https://pastmeetspixel.substack.com), a resource dedicated to exploring the intersection of history and video gaming and fostering collaborations between scholars, gamers, game designers, builders, creators, and educators interested in historical video games. I was also co-PI of the Hashima XR project (www.thehashimaXRproject.org), an immersive virtual experience using Extended Reality (XR) technology to recreate daily life on the island coal mining community of Hashima (also known as Gunkanjima), a UNESCO World Heritage site.

My first book, Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (Harvard, 2010), is an interdisciplinary study of the forgotten history of wage-earning Japanese women who, during the 1950s, militantly contested the socialist labor movement's revival of many prewar notions of normative gender roles.

My second book, Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (Cornell 2021), examines the forces that shaped the political consciousness of Japanese youth who chose to engage in radical politics during the 1960s and 1970s. It unpacks how notions of class and gender shaped the discourses produced by and for young men and women of the 'Sixties Generation'.