Paul B. Kreitman

20th Century Japanese history; environmental history; global history; commodity history; and histories of science and technology

Paul Kreitman is Associate Professor of 20th Century Japanese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His research interests include Japanese history, Pacific history, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and the global history of sovereignty since the 19th century.

At Columbia he teaches a range of survey courses on Japanese history, as well as upper-level courses on “Asian Mobilities” and “Troubled Islands of the Indo-Pacific” and graduate seminars on “Borderland Japan” and “Science, Environment and Technology in Japanese History”. Before coming to Columbia he was a junior research fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, a senior teaching fellow at SOAS, and a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Asia. In a previous life he worked as a carbon offset consultant at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities in Tokyo, accrediting greenhouse gas emission reduction projects under the Kyoto Protocol.

He received his PhD from Princeton in 2015, and since then his writing has appeared in various venues. His 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 for that year. A revised version of his doctoral dissertation was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023 under the title Japan’s Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty. And his next monograph project explores the history of trans-Pacific border controls with a focus on Japan and the Hawaiian archipelago in particular. His writing has also appeared in The Financial Times, The Japan Times, Asahi Shimbun, Tōyō Keizai Online, The Diplomat and The New Statesman.