Japan

Kyoko Matsui Loetscher

Kyoko Matsui Loetscher

Lecturer in Japanese, Associate Director of the Japanese Language Program

Office: 514 Kent Hall
Office Hours: TR 4:00-5:00
Phone: (212) 854-3523
Email: kml2168@columbia.edu

Educational Background

MA: Second Language Acquisition, Ohio State University
BA: English Literature, Aoyama Gakuin University

Classes Taught

JPNS UN1101 First Year Japanese I
JPNS UN1102 First Year Japanese II
JPNS UN3005 Third Year Japanese I
JPNS UN3006 Third Year Japanese II

Research Interests

Second Language Acquisition
Content-Based Instruction

Kyoko Matsui Loetscher joined Columbia University in 2010. Before joining Columbia, she taught at Princeton University for 8 years including Princeton Summer Program in Ishikawa. She developed curriculum and teaching materials for 4th and 5th year Japanese course based on Content-Based Instruction while teaching at Princeton. She is currently working on creating new teaching materials for Third Year Japanese.

Publications

Shokyuu Nihongo no moji purojekuto [Japanese Orthography Project] (with Shinji Sato and Yuri Kumagai; 2016)

David Lurie

lurieDavid Lurie

Wm. Theodore and Fanny Brett de Bary and Class of 1941 Collegiate Professor of Asian Humanities and Associate Professor of Japanese History and Literature

Office: 622 Kent
Office Hours: Click here to make an appointment.
Phone: (212) 854-5316
Email: dbl11@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Harvard University (’93)
MA: Columbia University (’96)
PhD: Columbia University (’01)

Classes Taught

JPNS GU4519 Introduction to Kanbun
EAAS UN2342 Mythology of East Asia
CPLS 3900 Introduction to Comparative Literature and Society
JPNS GR8040 Graduate Seminar in Premodern Japanese Literature

Research Interests

Japanese History and Literature, Technology of Language in Premodern Japan

In addition to the history of writing systems and literacy, David Lurie’s research interests include: the literary and cultural history of premodern Japan; the Japanese reception of Chinese literary, historical, and technical writings; the development of Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias; the history of linguistic thought; Japanese mythology; and world philology. Professor Lurie’s first book investigated the development of writing systems in Japan through the Heian period. Entitled Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing, it received the Lionel Trilling Award in 2012. Along with Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, he was co-editor of the Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (2015), to which he contributed chapters on myths, histories, gazetteers, and early literature in general. He is completing a new scholarly monograph, tentatively entitled The Emperor’s Dreams: Reading Japanese Mythology.

Please see his website for a complete list of publications and contributions.

Selected Publications

“Japanese Lexicography from ca. 1800 to the Present,” in The Cambridge World History of Lexicography, ed. John Considine, Cambridge University Press, 2019

“Parables of Inscription: Some Notes on Narratives of the Origin of Writing,” History and Theory 56, December 2018

Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)

“The Development of Japanese Writing,” in The Shape of Script: How and Why Writing Systems Change (SAR Press, 2012)

Paul Kreitman

Paul Kreitman

Assistant Professor of Japanese History, History-East Asia Coordinator

Office: 933 IAB
Office Hours: On leave 2021-2022 academic year
Phone: (212) 854-0374
Email: pk2528@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: University of Oxford (’06)
PhD: Princeton University (’15)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1361 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Japan
HSEA GU4822 Troubled Islands of the Indo-Pacific
HSEA GR8839 Graduate Colloquium in Modern Japanese History

Research Interests

Japanese history, environmental history, global history, science and technology studies

Paul Kreitman’s research interests include environmental history, global history, commodity history, and histories of science and technology. He received his PhD in History from Princeton University in 2015, with a doctoral dissertation entitled “Feathers, Fertilizer and States of Nature: Uses of Albatrosses in the U.S.-Japan Borderlands”. He is currently working on a book manuscript exploring the relationship between resource extraction, nature conservation and state formation in the North Pacific. His second project examines the political ecology of excrement in the Greater Tokyo area, focusing on the slow obsolescence of night soil fertilizer over the course of the twentieth century.

Paul received his BA from the University of Oxford in 2006, after which he worked as a carbon offset consultant at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities in Tokyo. He joins Columbia after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, jointly affiliated with SOAS.