Specialty: Japanese history and culture, with ongoing research in the history of science.
Trained as a historian of Japan and East Asia at Princeton (A.B. 1961) and UC Berkeley (M.A. 1962, Ph.D. 1965), I taught history at the University of Toronto for one year, at Connecticut College for 25 years, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 2 years before coming to Berkeley in 1993 as Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Cultures, while serving concurrently as Director of the East Asian Library, then housed in Durant Hall. I elected to take early retirement at age 59 and 1/2 and returned for family reasons to New England, where I've since been teaching history at Northeastern University.
My academic background is in Japanese history and culture, with ongoing research in the history of science. Areas of interest: teaching East Asian history and culture; recent research projects on Japanese arts, environmental history, marathon racing, and history of science. My most recent book treats the history of botany in Japan, East Asia, and the world. Currently I'm researching the history of astrophysics and cosmology in Japan and East Asia.
