Event Details

Prof. Paul Kreitman of Columbia University discusses his work on the ecology of Sino-Japanese disputed islands, in this joint Lancaster University Confucius Institute and Lancaster University China Centre seminar

Abstract:

The Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands have been the focus of a long-running sovereignty dispute between China and Japan. Since the 1960s they have also emerged as a site of nature conservation, as Japanese scientists, government officials and local activists have campaigned to research and protect endangered species endemic to the island such as Steller's Albatross and the Senkaku Mole. This talk explores the history of these campaigns and the ways in which they have intersected with efforts to assert Japanese sovereignty over the islands themselves.

Speaker Biography:

Paul Kreitman is an Associate Professor of 20th Century Japanese History at Columbia University in New York. His first book, Japan’s Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 2023), explores the environmental history of the uninhabited islands that today rim the outer perimeter of the Japanese body politic. His article “Attacked by Excrement: The Political Ecology of Shit in Wartime and Postwar Tokyo” won the American Society for Environmental History’s Leopold Hidy Prize in 2018. His writing has also appeared in The Japan Times, The Financial Times, the Asahi Shimbun, Tōyō Keizai Online, The Spectator, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is currently working on a history of border control in Japan since the 16th century.