Speaker: Hannah Shepherd, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Yale University
On June 1, 2026, following a day spent touring Itoshima's fisheries and working alongside oyster farmers in Shimakishi, students in the inaugural cohort of Columbia Summer in Itoshima gathered for dinner at Noburin Oyster Shack for a talk by Hannah Shepherd, Assistant Professor of History at Yale University.
A historian of modern Japan and Korea, Shepherd spoke about her research into Fukuoka's modern and imperial-era history — the same city whose waters and coastline the program's students had spent the day working alongside. Her talk drew on the arguments of her first book, The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region (University of California Press, 2025), which traces the entwined histories of Fukuoka and the Korean port city of Pusan across the eight decades from Japan's forced opening of Korea's ports in 1876 to the end of the Korean War in 1953. Drawing on Japanese and Korean archives, the book follows how war, colonization, and industrial capitalism bound the two cities into a shared regional history whose legacies outlasted formal empire.
For students who had spent the preceding weeks reading and working across Itoshima's own coastline and watershed, Shepherd's talk offered a longer historical lens on the region: a reminder that the waters and port towns of Fukuoka carry a modern history of empire and exchange as layered as the ecological and agrarian histories at the center of the program's curriculum.
