Joshua Schlachet is a postdoctoral fellow in Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge at the MPIWG and Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. Schlachet’s current project—part of the “Common Knowledge and Its Sources in the Sinosphere” Working Group—seeks to ground the aestheticized world of Japanese craft ceramics in a social history of producers, materials, and knowledge systems. Trained as a cultural historian of early modern Japan, Schlachet received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 2018.
His first monograph, Nourishing Life: Cultures of Food and Health in Early Modern Japan (UHP, 2026), examines the emergence of a dietary common knowledge that expanded the concept of a well-nourished body to encompass economic productivity, status hierarchy, and moral cultivation. Together with William C. Hedberg, Schlachet is co-editor of Interdisciplinary Edo: Towards an Integrated Approach to Early Modern Japan (Routledge, 2024), a collected volume of humanistic research from across the methodological spectrum. His research and commentary have appeared in publications such as Asian Medicine, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Monumenta Nipponica.
Schlachet serves as PI for the Eating Right Everywhere Initiative, which seeks to reimagine healthful consumption in a global, humanistic framework. By combining cutting-edge research in health humanities and cultural studies with perspectives from nutritionists, industry professionals, and community stakeholders, this first-of-its-kind project bridges geographical and temporal perspectives towards a holistic, multicultural theory of eating right.
