Fields
- History of Japan
- World history
- History of Technology
- Media Studies
Teaching
- Modern Japan
- World History
- Global Approaches to the Concept of Modernity (graduate course)
- Tea, Monsters, Manga, and Anime: A Cultural History of Japan
- Media and Technology in Modern Asia
- Asian and African Encounters with Empire
- Critical Approaches to Asian History (graduate course)
- PhD, Harvard University, 2009
Education & Training
- National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan, 2021
- Hakuho Foundation Long-Term Japanese Studies Fellowship, 2018-2019
- Japan Foundation Long-Term Research Fellowship, 2015-2016
- Council of American Overseas Research Centers Multi-Country Research Fellowship, Summer 2016
- Japan Foundation Long-term research fellow, June 2015 to May 2016
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellow, July 2012 to June 2013
- Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research, 2012-2013
Monograph and Edited Volumes
Unicode and the Humanities, special issue of the Journal of Asian Studies. Edited with Chris Lowy, with an introduction by the editors. Forthcoming 2025–2026.
Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education. Columbia Studies in International and Global History. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019
Articles
"Technology and the Savior Myth of Sinographs." In Cambridge History of Technology. Volume 3. Ed. by Dagmar Schäfer, Francesca Bray, Shadreck Chirikure, Tiago Saraiva, and Matteo Valleriani. Forthcoming 2025-2026.
“Big Tech, the Big State, and the Battle for Encoding all of the World's Languages.” In Unicode and the Humanities, special issue of the Journal of Asian Studies. Forthcoming 2025–2026.
Buitrago, Paola, Evgeny Toropov, Rajanie Prabha, Julian Uran, and Raja Adal, “MiikeMineStamps: A Long-Tailed Dataset of Japanese Stamps via Active Learning.” ICDAR 2021. Springer, 2021: 3-19.
“How do you Understand ‘Infrastructure.’” In Infrastructures of Inter-Asian Connection: Scripts, Media, Movement. Special Issue: Infrastructures and Global Political Aesthetics. Verge: Studies in Global Asias 6, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 50-55.
“Taipuraitā ha shintai to bunshō wo tsunageuruka?” [Can the typewriter connect the body and the text?]. In “Mitsui bunko shiryō: Watashi no itten.” Special issue, Mitsui bunko rongi 50 (2017): 4-5.
“Aesthetics and the End of the Mimetic Moment: The Introduction of Art Education in Japanese and Egyptian Schools,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no. 4 (October 2016): 982-1003.
“Japan’s Bifurcated Modernity: Writing and Calligraphy in Japanese Public Schools, 1872-1943.” Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 2-3 (2009): 233-247.
“Shakib Arslan’s Imagining of Europe: The Colonizer, the Inquisitor, the Islamic, the Virtuous, and the Friend.” In Islam in Europe in the Interwar Period: Networks, Status, Challenges. Edited by Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain, 156-182. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
“Constructing Transnational Islam: The East-West Network of Shakib Arslan.” In Intellectuals in the Modern Islamic Word: Transmission, Transformation, and Communication. Edited by Stephane Dudoignon, Hisao Komatsu, and Yasushi Kosugi, 176-210. London: Routledge, 2006.
I am interested in how an understanding of the past can help us chart a better future. This has led me to a study of the history of particular regions (primarily Japan and the Middle East), but it has also led me towards various methods for better understanding the past. These include world history, with its long time frames and broad world historical connections and comparisons, and the computational humanities, which help us use the large number of sources in modern archives to understand history at multiple temporal and spatial scales.
My most recent work is on world scripts and the technologies for writing them. I have recently written three articles on this topic. One is a critique of the historiography on the role of technology in the modern history of Sinographs ("Technology and the Savior Myth of Sinographs"). The second is about the politics that led to the birth of the Unicode Standard that made most of the world's scripts interoperable on digital devices ("Big Tech, the Big State, and the Battle for Encoding all of the World's Languages”). The third proposes that we shift our understanding of textual technologies from a process of textual production that is concerned with writing to one of textual reproduction that is concerned with communication ("A Social History of Text in a Modern Japanese Office: From Textual Production to Textual Reproduction"). These three works are part of a larger book manuscript on the material history of writing.
To understand the practice of writing in a modern Japanese office, I led a project that indexed the 38,055 pages of business documents in the Mitsui Mi’ike Mine Archive, one of the largest business archives in modern Japan that covers the period from 1889 to 1941. Computational methods have allowed me to complement a close reading of sources with a distant reading. They have enabled me to chart writing and reproduction instruments across decades, to map networks of epistolary exchange across space, and to use the countless stamps on business documents to understand the labor of document production. I am working to publish this index online as a shared digital resource.
I also seek to contribute to History as a profession. This year, as the director of the World History Center, I am committed to bringing historians working on different world regions and historical periods into conversations about a shared human past. Please see a list of our latest events on the website of the World History Center.
I welcome inquiries from graduate students interested in working with me, either as their primary advisor or as a member of their committee.
