Paul is Unson Microcollege Program Director and an associate research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. His research interests include Japanese history, environmental history, migration history, and Pacific history. He received his PhD in History from Princeton in 2015, and since 2016 has taught and researched in various capacities at Columbia: the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Department of History, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. His article "Attacked by Excrement: The Political Ecology of Shit in Wartime and Postwar Tokyo" was published in the journal Environmental History in 2018 and won the Association for the Study of Environmental History's Leopold-Hidy Prize. His monograph Japan's Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. He has taught a range of courses on Japanese history as well as upper-level courses on "Asian Mobilities," "Japan 1968," "Troubled Islands of the Indo-Pacific," and graduate seminars on "Borderland Japan," “Introduction to Historical Interpretation and Methods” (GR8910), and "Science, Environment and Technology in Japanese History." His writing has also appeared in The Financial Times, The Japan Times,Asahi Shimbun, Tōyō Keizai Online, and The New Statesman. He is currently researching the history of labour migration regulation in the Pacific plantationocene.
Paul has also been a junior research fellow at the University of London's Institute of Historical Research, a senior teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London, a Japan Foundation visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, and a JSPS visiting fellow at Osaka University. Before entering academia he worked as a carbon offset consultant at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities in Tokyo, accrediting greenhouse gas emission reduction projects under the Kyoto Protocol.
Masanori Seto is the founder and director of NPO Soma, a Fukuoka-based organization dedicated to forest restoration, traditional land stewardship, and ecological education. He earned his PhD in Entomology from Cornell University, where he specialized in soil organisms, spatio-temporal dynamics, and the interplay between hydrology, biodiversity, and human land use. He now applies this scientific training to practical conservation projects across Japan.
In partnership with the Unson Foundation, Seto has been working to restore the soil drainage systems in the ancient shrine groves of Dazaifu Tenmangū, where centuries-old trees have been threatened by urban runoff and soil compaction. His approach combines ecological assessment with historical landscape knowledge and has helped establish new standards for managing sacred woodlands in densely settled regions. He also serves as a program researcher and key community partner for the Columbia Summer in Itoshima program, connecting students with the ecological systems, historical landscapes, and human networks that shape contemporary Japan.
Junho Peter Yoon is the Assistant Director of Columbia Summer in Itoshima at the Weatherhead East Asian institute. His research encompasses various fields, namely critical theory, cultural studies, ethics, and ecological thought, among others. In his doctoral dissertation project at New York University, tentatively titled "Toward Planetary Ethics," Junho traces the contours of what ethical thought and action might look like in the age of Anthropocene, contextualizing this inquiry through modern and contemporary Korean history, literature, and cinema. He holds an interdisciplinary M.A degree from University of Chicago, and a B.A in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University.
He has also previously worked with journals and various cultural institutions like e-flux Journal and Screening Room as a fellow, Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTIK), and New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF). He is currently co-editing two special issues on global Asian photography and the archive, and posthuman visuality in contemporary South Korean art and media.