I first became interested in science in secondary school, when I used to participate in mathematics competitions in my home country and wanted to become a mathematician. Then, in my final years of high school, my history teacher inspired me to believe that I could also be a historian. It took a while to realize that I would not have to choose between the two if I became a historian of science!  

I completed my undergraduate and graduate education at the Universities of Tokyo (BA and MA in Asian Area Studies) and Heidelberg (PhD in Modern History), after which I spent several years as a postdoctoral researcher in Oxford and Heidelberg. I joined the University of Manchester in 2023, where I currently work as Senior Lecturer in Global History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Most of my research has focused on the history of science and technology in colonial South Asia and Japan. I have worked on several projects to date, examining the history of Earth and environmental sciences, women in STEM and the intersections of telecommunications, media and medicine. This research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the European Research Council, the German Research Foundation (DFG), CHANSE: Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe, and the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. I am also the recipient of the American Historical Association's 2017 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize for the best book on the history of journalism in any area of the world and the 2022 Mercurians Prize in the History of Communication Technologies of the Society for the History of Technology. 

I currently lead the level 3 unit HSTM31111 & 31121 Fossils: Global Histories of Natural Heritage, Science and Empire. I also co-teach the level 3 unit HSTM30332 & 30342 People and Power in the Digital Age, HSTM60652 Decolonising the History of Science, as part of the MA History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and HSTM60582 Presenting Science in Public, as part of the MSc Science and Health Communication. 

I am happy to hear from students with an interest in the (global) history of science and technology in East Asia, South Asia and beyond. I am particularly interested in supervising dissertations that push the epistemological and linguistic boundaries of the "archive," for example by working with natural history collections and multilingual records to examine topics in Earth and environmental history, histories of natural heritage, gender and science, the history of telecommunications, especially at its intersections with media, medicine and public health or the history of science communication. 

Below are some of the projects on which I have worked to date.

Media, Epidemics and Technologies of Science Communication

Between November 2022-January 2023, before moving to Manchester, I acted as Project Leader for 'Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Science Communication and Public Health in the 20th and 21st Centuries,' a three-year project funded by CHANSE: Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe. The project brought together humanities researchers and art practitioners from Poland, Romania and the UK to study the relationship between technologies of communication and the management of epidemic outbreaks since the beginning of the 20th century. Research focused on five groups of social actors, some of whom have been central to epidemic responses, while others have been relegated to their margins: governments, healthcare professionals and health activists, media institutions and practitioners, persons with disabilities, minorities and migrants. The project has now concluded, but more information is available on the project website. 

Global History of Palaeoscience in South Asia

'Archives of the Earth: Fossils, Science and Historical Imaginaries in Twentieth-Century India' (2020-2022) was a research project based at the University of Heidelberg. It was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and implemented in collaboration with palaeontologists Prof. Ashok Sahni (Panjab) and Dr. Advait M. Jukar (Arizona). Using documentary and fossil archives, the project studied the institutionalization of palaeontology and palaeobotany in twentieth-century India, tracing connections to Germany, Japan, the United States and Switzerland. It also shed light on global efforts to collect, exchange, study and preserve fossils from the Indian subcontinent, the role of natural history collections in building institutions of education like museums and how fossil archives have been used to understand the deep history of the Earth and its relation to the human past. This project also prompted me to look more closely at the intersections of gender and (palaeo)science, leading to the publication of an open-access, co-edited volume on Negotiating In/visibility: Women, Science, Engineering and Medicine in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2025).

Telecommunications Technologies, Medicine and Public Health

As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, I was involved in two projects: the Wellcome Trust-funded 'The Challenge of Urbanisation: Health and the Global City,' led by Prof. Mark Harrison, and the ERC-funded 'Diseases of Modern Life,' led by Prof. Sally Shuttleworth. My research investigated how medical practitioners and public health officials used telegraphs and telephones as instruments of communication and diagnosis in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It also examined public health anxieties associated with telecommunications technologies: in Victorian Britain, where public telephones were believed to act as vectors for the transmission of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, and contemporary India, where mobile phones and telecom towers have been linked to increased risk of cancer, headaches or infertility.  The findings were published as part of a co-authored monograph, Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Pittsburgh University Press, 2019) and peer-review articles, one of which, '"Contagion by Telephone": Print Media and Knowledge about Infectious Diseases in Britain, 1880-1914,' Technology and Culture, 62, 3 (2021): 1063-1086, was awarded the inaugural 2022 SHOT Mercurians Prize in the History of Communication Technologies. 

Telegraphy and Journalism in Colonial South Asia... and Beyond

My first monograph, The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of News Reporting in Colonial India, c.1830-1900 (Oxford University Press, 2016), was based on my doctoral research at the University of Heidelberg. It combined macro- and micro-history approaches with insights from the history of technology and media studies to develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding how electric telegraphy was incorporated into journalism in colonial South Asia. Drawing on English, Hindi and Japanese-language sources, this study challenged conventional narratives of media revolutions, showing instead that the use of telegraphy in journalism was gradual and piecemeal. The monograph was awarded the American Historical Association's 2017 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize for the best book on the history of journalism in any area of the world.