I am a historian of modern Japanese material and visual culture. My research explores the ways Japan’s social, political and cultural transformations shape photographic culture and the mass press; state implementations of photography and uses of photography against the state; the gendering of photographic technology and industrial design; the values embedded into the materiality of images and objects; the politics of museum practices of collection and display; and the relationship between photography and protest of environmental degradation.

My current book manuscript, The Cameraman in a Skirt: The Making of Modern Japanese Photography examines the transformational arc of camera culture in Japan from the 1930s to 1970s. Beginning with state sponsorship of the camera as a weapon of war and the women photographers who negotiated with producing propaganda for the state, I then address postwar approaches to photography in the context of the American Occupation and the Korean War, and show how in the 1960s and 1970s women photographers transformed the camera into a tool turned against the state and corporations as they photographed protest, pollution events, and the Women’s Liberation movement.

I am the principal Investigator and Co-Director of the SSHRC IDG and UBC TLEF funded digital humanities project, “Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography.” Behind the Camera is an open-source website that creates new critical directions on the history of photography, feminist art history, and the history of modern Japan.

I am the co-lead of the Critical Image Forum (CIF), a Research Excellence Cluster funded by the Office of the Vice President, Research and Innovation. The CIF is an interdisciplinary research cluster that focuses on the political, ethical, aesthetic and social dimensions of photography, image archives, and expanded documentary practices.

Teaching/Supervision

HIST 201 History Through Photographs

How has photography changed the way that we understand and study past historical events? We trace over 150 years of the wider history of photography as it shaped a range of fields and became a powerful tool for the sciences and medicine, colonial infrastructure, wartime propaganda, communicating the news, constructing individual and national identities, advertising, protest, environmental activism and feminist critique around the globe. This history of photography seeks to amplify perspectives from around the globe and also approach local archives as central to understanding how histories of migration and colonialism are crucial to Vancouver’s history. The class will combine background historical context lectures with active group discussions and activities, visual analysis of photographs, and in-depth engagements with online photography archives.

HIST 271 Japan and Global History

This class sees images and objects as the crystallization of large historical events. A survey of modern Japanese History, it uses individual objects and images to explore major themes of the nineteenth through twentieth centuries: imperialism, war, violence, and atrocity; cultural change and construction of hierarchies; racism; evolving norms of gender and sexuality; changing patterns of consumption and inequality; and destruction of the environment.  Each of the course’s lectures focuses on a single image or “object”—from early photographs and postcards to tattoos and anime—to trace how images and objects play an important role in defining and creating the modern world. We will develop the skills necessary to read images and objects like texts and will be mining online digitized archives of historical materials to create arguments about how images are not merely a reflection of history, but construct history itself. History 271 will introduce you to the methods of historical inquiry, including primary-source analysis, library and research skills, and public history.

HIST 376 Modern Japanese History

What did it mean to be a “modern” citizen in a time when people across the globe were simultaneously building the idea of nations, empires, and citizenship as well as resisting these new conceptions? In this course we explore how the concept of “Japan” has been manufactured and asserted over time to understand what Japan has meant to different groups of people and how they have re-envisioned it through visual and material culture. We will dive into modes of resistance and control from a range of perspectives including: female anarchists, government agencies, artists, indigenous voices, the Korean diaspora, architecture, the mass media, activists and protestors. These divergent voices will help us understand the constructions of gender, nationalism, class, race, and empire in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. In our focus on visual historical evidence (photographs, films, paintings, advertisements, maps, propaganda, and more) this course encourages students to challenge notions of what types of materials make up history. In your analysis of these materials you will become a producer of historical interpretations, not merely a passive consumer of them.

HIST 490R History Through Photographs: Exploring Photographic Archives

How has photography changed the way that we understand and study past historical events? How do photographic archives shape the way we access historical photographs as evidence of the past and important sites for community building? This course focuses on photographs and their archives to explore how historians might learn to understand the context in which historical photographs were made and the process of their collection, preservation, and presentation in archives. A key theme of the class is focus on photography as it was employed by colonial regimes as a technology of control and how archival access to these photographs provides opportunities to write the histories of the colonial gaze. This seminar will pair thematic readings with visits to local archives in Vancouver including the Museum of Vancouver, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, the Vancouver Museum of the Police, the Chinese Canadian Museum, the Museum of Anthropology, and UBC Special Collections. Each week we will examine photographs in these archives and accompanying exhibitions through active group discussions.

Research Interests:

Modern Japan

History of Visual and Material Culture

History of Photography

History of Technology

History of Gender and Sexuality

Edited Volumes

I am a co-editor and contributor to I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now (Aperture, 2024).

Journal Articles

“Inventing a Photographic Past for Japan: From A Century of Japanese Photography (1968) to the Construction of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography,” History of Photography Vol. 46, Issue 4 (2022).

“Tokiwa Toyoko, the nude shooting session, and the gendered optics of Japanese postwar photography,” Japan Forum Vol. 34, Issue 3 (2021): 383-411.

“Ogawa Kazumasa and the Halftone Photograph: Japanese War Albums in Turn of the Twentieth Century Japan,” Trans-Asia Photography Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 2017.

Public Scholarship

“A Century of Japanese Photography: Historical Reckoning and the Birth of a New Movement” in Sandra S. Phillips, ed. Focus on Japanese Photography. SF MoMA Digital Publications, 2022.

“Why was Japanese WWII propaganda on display outside the Met?” The Washington Post. November 9, 2021.

I was awarded the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute 2023 Open Scholarship Awards Honourable Mention for the digital humanities project “Behind the Camera” (January 2023). My article on Tokiwa Toyoko and the gendered politics of postwar photography was awarded the Japan Art History Forum and Japanese Art Society of America Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Prize (2018).