I am a historian of early modern and modern Japan, specializing in the cultural history of food and nourishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My current project, “Nourishing Life: Diet, Body, and Society in Early Modern Japan (1600-1868)” examines the emergence of dietary “common knowledge” as new practical guidebooks circulating among ordinary readers expanded the concept of a well-nourished body to encompass economic productivity, status hierarchy, and moral cultivation. My research interests address the history of Japanese foodways and their relationship to bodily and social health, historical popular culture representations of proper eating, and comparative food studies in East Asian and global history.

East Asian Studies Profile