Japan

Paul Kreitman

Paul Kreitman

Associate Professor of Japanese History

Office: Kent 613
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.

Shigeru Eguchi

Shigeru Eguchi

Senior Lecturer in Japanese

Office: 518 Kent Hall
Office Hours: TR 1:00-2:00
Phone: (212) 854-8345
Email: se53@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Teaching of English, Ibaraki University
MA: Japanese Pedagogy, University of Iowa

Classes Taught

JPNS UN1001 Introductory Japanese A
JPNS UN2201 Second Year Japanese I
JPNS UN2202 Second Year Japanese II
JPNS GU4017 Fourth Year Japanese I
JPNS GU4018 Fourth Year Japanese II

Research Interests

Japanese Pedagogy
Japanese Grammar

Shigeru Eguchi has taught all levels of Japanese at Columbia University. He is also the Administrative Director of the Summer MA Program in Japanese Pedagogy since 2006. He has over a dozen years of experience teaching Japanese at Columbia, and also taught at Middlebury College’s Summer Program in Japanese, and at the Hokkaido International Foundation. He has developed teaching lessons based on unusual and creative materials, including haiku and video projects. He is currently developing new textbooks for intermediate level (Routledge, 2011) with Dr. Fumiko Nazikian, and other colleagues.

Publications

Hiyaku: An Intermediate Japanese Course (Routledge, 2011; co-authors: Miharu Nittono, Fumiko Nazikian, Keiko Okamoto, Jisuk Park)
Schaum’s Outlines-Japanese Vocabulary(McGraw-Hill Company, 2000; co-author)
“Exploration through “Hiyaku”: Considering Authenticity of Context”, 17th Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum (2011)

Michael Como

Michael Como

Tōshū Fukami Associate Professor of Shinto Studies

Office: 307 80 Claremont
Office Hours: On leave for the fall 2020 semester
Phone: (212) 854-4144
Email: mc2575@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Harvard University (’85)
PhD: Stanford University (’00)

Classes Taught

AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
RELI UN2308 East Asian Buddhism
EARL 9335 Graduate Seminar in Japanese Religion

Research Interests

Transmission and diffusion of rituals and deities to Japan, local religious traditions, urbanization and theological innovation

Michael Como’s recent research has focused on the religious history of the Japanese islands from the Asuka through the early Heian periods, with a particular focus upon the Chinese and Korean deities, rites and technological systems that were transmitted to the Japanese islands during this time. He is the author of several articles on the ritual and political consequences of the introduction of literacy, sericulture and horse-culture from the Asian sub-continent into ancient Japan. He is currently working on a new monograph that focuses upon urbanization and the materiality of performance and interpretation in Japanese religion in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Selected Publications

Medieval Shintō (co-editor with Bernard Faure and Iyanaga Nobumi, 2010)

Weaving and Binding: Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan (University of Hawaii, 2009)

Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual and Violence in the Formation of Japanese Buddhism (Oxford University, 2008)