I began my study of East Asian History as an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary in the late 1970s. Between my junior and senior years, I took time off to engage in intensive language study in Taiwan and Japan. After graduating (finally) in 1982, I returned to Japan and entered the MA program at Jochi (Sophia) University in Tokyo. It was in a course taught by Professor Kate Nakai that I first became interested in early modern nativism, an interest that led me to enter the Ph.D. program at The University of Chicago. At the U of C, I studied under Tetsuo Najita and Harry Harootunian. I spent two years at Osaka University in 1989-1991 where I studied with Koyasu Nobukuni. My dissertation was later revised and published as my first book, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Duke University Press, 2003). While I was working on my dissertation, I became interested in the topic of medicine, because this topic, like Nativism, is a fruitful point of access into the transformation of society and culture in the nineteenth century. I've written a series of articles on issues such as the rise of obstetrics as a medical discipline, venereal disease regulation, leprosy, the marketing of patent drugs, and the formation of public health discourse, but the study of formation of psychiatry and the social, cultural, and political negotiations it required has been at the center of my work on medicine. My teaching career began at the University of Texas at Austin where I began teaching in 1993. In 2002, I returned to the University of Chicago as an associate professor.