Historian and Writer
Australian (Canberra)
I am a professor emerita in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. My research deals mainly with modern Eastern Asian history, focusing on issues of borders, migration, cultural diversity, social movements and memory politics. I also have a deep interest in the role of art – including artistic representations of nature and war – in history. For the past thirty years, I have been particularly fascinated by the area which today spans the borders of Japan, Russia and China – including the Sea of Okhotsk and the islands of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuriles. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this region was transformed from an area of trade and contact between multiple ethnic and cultural groups into a region bisected by national borders. How did this transformation come about, and what impact has it had on the region’s peoples? My published books include Henkyō kara Nagameru (The View from the Frontier, 2000), To the Diamond Mountains: A Hundred Year Journey through China and Korea (2010), Japan’s Living Politics (2020), On the Frontiers of History (2020), and the historical novel The Lantern Boats, set in Japan and Sakhalin (2021).
