ANDREW D. GORDON
Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History
Andrew D. Gordon teaches courses on modern Japanese history with a primary research interest in labor, class and the social and political history of modern Japan. His most recent monograph, Fabricating Consumers, examined the making of the modern consumer in 20th century Japan, with a particular focus on the sewing machine. In 2016 and 2017, he published three articles on the history of Japan’s so-called “Lost Decades” from the 1990s through 2010s. During the pandemic, he published a co-authored article with Michael Reich on the history of vaccination and vaccination hesitancy in Japan, as well as several blog postings on Japanese policies and societal responses to COVID-19. In 2023, he contributed a chapter titled “Japan’s Transwar Political Economy” in the third volume of The New Cambridge History of Japan: The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c. 1868 to the Twenty-First Century. His textbook, A Modern History of Japan, is widely used in college classes. He published a new (4th) edition in 2020, which added a focus on environmental history.
Professor Gordon is currently working on a book on public history in Japan, focused on the curation of sites of industrial heritage including the coal mines designated in 2015 as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Several recent talks on this project are available on his website. Since 2011, he has led the Reischauer Institute's Japan Disasters Digital Archive (JDA) project in collaboration with colleagues in Japan.