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. He has recently published several articles on the history of Japan’s so-called “Lost Decades” from the 1990s through 2010s, and during the pandemic he has 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. 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. Since 2011, he has led the Reischauer Institute's Japan Disasters Digital Archive (JDA) project in collaboration with colleagues in Japan.