David Fedman

David Fedman serves as Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in East Asian environmental and imperial history. He is the author of Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020) and co-editor of Forces of Nature: New Approaches to Korean Environments (Cornell University Press, 2023).

His doctoral training was completed at Stanford University. Research interests center on colonial environmental management, Korean-Japanese historical relations, and the urban destruction of Japan during WWII. Notably, he co-directs JapanAirRaids.org—a bilingual digital archive documenting Allied bombing campaigns—with geographer Cary Karacas.

Fedman actively engages public audiences through writings in The New York Times, National Public Radio, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He served as Executive Producer for Paper City, an award-winning documentary examining Tokyo firebombing memory. His collaborative projects bridge academic research with digital humanities and documentary filmmaking.