I have been at Georgetown since 1997, teaching courses focused primarily on modern Japanese history and culture. Since my background is in history, I am affiliated with the History Department as well as East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Japan has been a second home to me for over fifteen years, roughly half of which I have spent living in Tokyo. I came to the study of Japanese language and culture entirely by accident while looking around for a major as an undergraduate at Columbia. After my first visit, in the summer of 1983, I was addicted. Between 1985 and 1988, I attended Tokyo University, where I took a Masters in Architecture History. I then returned to Columbia, shifting my discipline to History, and finishing a doctorate in 1995.

My research has been eclectic, but always related to the experience of modernization in Japan, and rooted in questions about urbanism, dwelling and material life. In Tokyo during the late 1980's and early 1990's, while the city was in the throes of the most severe real estate bubble a world capital had ever experienced, I interviewed old downtown residents about the local past and sought to track the loss of the old city. Together with Japanese colleagues, I documented Tokyo's surviving prewar neighborhoods and the city's last fishing community. My book “House and Home in Modern Japan” looks at the ways that westernizing reformers reinvented Japanese domestic space and family life during early in the twentieth century. I have also written about museums and public history, the history of urban fires and firefighting, and the history of food.