Comparative Literature Program

Jordan Sand is Associate Professor of Japanese History and Culture. He teaches modern Japanese history and other topics in East Asian history, as well as urban history and a seminar on the world history of food. He has a doctorate in history from Columbia University and an MA in architecture history from the University of Tokyo. He has published on a wide range of topics in Japanese history, with a particular focus on architecture, urbanism, material culture and the history of everyday life. House and Home in Modern Japan (Harvard, 2004) explores the ways that westernizing reformers reinvented Japanese domestic space and family life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His forthcoming book, Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (University of California Press, 2013), analyzes problems of history and memory in the postindustrial city. He has also researched the comparative history of urban fires and firefighting, the modernization and globalization of Japanese foodways (miso and MSG in particular), and the history of furniture and interiors. He is presently working on a study of manifestations of colonialism in physical forms ranging from bodily comportment to urban planning, to be published in Japanese by Iwanami shoten.

From 2009 through 2011, he served as Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.