Joshua Schlachet is a historian of early modern and modern Japan, specializing in the cultural history of food and nourishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His current project, “Nourishing Life: Diet, Body, and Society in Early Modern Japan,” examines the emergence of a dietary “common knowledge” as new practical guidebooks circulating among ordinary readers expanded the concept of a well-nourished body to encompass economic productivity, status hierarchy, and moral cultivation. His research interests include global and comparative food studies, histories of science and health, book history and popular publishing, material culture and artisanship, and Dutch-Japanese exchange.
Schlachet teaches courses on Japanese and East Asian history, dietary cultures, and everyday life. He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and holds an M.A. (Japanese Studies) from the University of Michigan and B.A. (History) from Cornell University.