Paul Kreitman

Twentieth-century Japanese history; environmental history; global history; commodity history; and histories of science and technology

Paul Kreitman is Director of the Columbia Summer in Itoshima program and a Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. His research interests include Japanese history, environmental history, migration history, and Pacific history. He received his PhD in History from Princeton in 2015, and since 2016 has taught and researched in various capacities at Columbia: the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Department of History, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. 

Paul's article "Attacked by Excrement: The Political Ecology of Shit in Wartime and Postwar Tokyo" was published in the journal Environmental History in 2018 and won the Association for the Study of Environmental History's Leopold-Hidy Prize. His monograph Japan's Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. He has taught a range of courses on Japanese history as well as upper-level courses on "Asian Mobilities," "Japan 1968," "Troubled Islands of the Indo-Pacific," and graduate seminars on "Borderland Japan," “Introduction to Historical Interpretation and Methods” (GR8910), and "Science, Environment and Technology in Japanese History." His writing has also appeared in The Financial Times, The Japan Times,Asahi Shimbun, Tōyō Keizai Online, and The New Statesman. He is currently researching the history of labor migration regulation in the Pacific plantationocene.

Paul has also been a junior research fellow at the University of London's Institute of Historical Research, a senior teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London, a Japan Foundation visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, and a JSPS visiting fellow at Osaka University. Before entering academia he worked as a carbon offset consultant at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities in Tokyo, accrediting greenhouse gas emission reduction projects under the Kyoto Protocol.