I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Yale University. I specialize in the social and economic history of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868). My dissertation project is about the role of merchants and their money in the 18th and 19th century. In particular, it focuses on the Nakai Genzaemon merchant house, a wealthy and powerful firm that at its peak founded over 20 stores across the Japanese archipelago. Their archive of nearly 30,000 documents offers a unique window onto the complex interactions between commerce, merchant capital, and society in the late Tokugawa period, covering everything from finance, trade, and governance to disputes with local gangsters, reports on local society, and the get-rich-quick schemes of disgruntled employees. My interests, then, run the gamut from the gender dynamics of the merchant house to the role of privately-backed paper currency in the making of samurai economic policy.

Outside of my research, I am interested in local document preservation and post-disaster recovery in Japan. I have worked with the Miyagi Shiryō Network on the restoration and use of historical documents damaged by the 3/11 triple disaster, and have presented on local history in Japan.

I was raised in Beverly, Massachusetts. After earning my B.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University, I worked in the tech industry in Seattle before winning a Fulbright fellowship to study at Tōhoku University in Sendai, Japan for a year.