Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Aaron's research examines the relationship between the environment and empire. More specifically, he's interested in examining the “nature” of imperialism through the lens of Japan’s national-imperial park system. Aaron's interested in, first, how the accompanying identification, conservation, and monumentalization of selected park spaces arose out of a new scientific body of knowledge that made legible the various peoples and environments encountered through state and capital expansion, and, second, how that knowledge imbued both national and colonial landscapes with a new moral and cultural significance that operated in the service of legitimizing the nation-empire and its accompanying narratives of a “natural” order."