Andrew Bernstein

Specialty

Japanese History, Environmental History

Academic Credentials

PhD 1999 Columbia University, MA 1994 Columbia University, BA1990 Amherst College

Teaching

Fall 2024

HIST 110-01: Early East Asian History

HIST 261-F1: Global Environmental History

 

My courses introduce students to the particularities of Japanese and environmental history while challenging them to think closely about the process of reading and writing history in general. Whether we examine courtier culture in the eleventh century or industrial pollution in the twentieth, I encourage students to reflect on the assumptions, techniques, and purposes involved in telling stories about the past.

Research

My scholarship has been shaped by a fundamental concern for how humans struggle to build and maintain connections to the past in the midst of radical change. In Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan (2006), I examine the ways in which different interest groups in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Japan sought to preserve, abandon, or reinvent death rituals that had developed over generations to build continuity in the face of loss. The question “What to do with the past?” haunts Modern Passings from start to finish, informing such topics as the reworking of cremation from a minority religious practice into a mandated public health measure, the expulsion of temple graveyards from city centers, and the evolution of funeral professionals from suppliers of ritual paraphernalia into purveyors of ritual knowledge.

My second book, Fuji: A Mountain in the Making, will be released in September 2025. Fuji achieved global fame as a beautiful wonder of nature and enduring symbol of Japan. But behind this picture-postcard image is a history full of conflicts, contradictions, and upheaval. Fuji has erupted violently over the centuries, wreaking havoc and instilling fear. It has long been an object of worship, but the deities inhabiting the mountain have changed radically over time. A totem of national unity, it has been embroiled in disputes over the direction the nation should take. And while its splendid form has inspired countless works of literature and art, its lower slopes host military training grounds and its water sustains a polluting paper industry. Through examining these and other aspects of Fuji, I reveal a mountain always in the making, and invite readers to reflect more broadly on our relationships—material and imagined, creative and destructive—with the natural world and each other.