Joshua Linkous is a PhD student in History and East Asian Languages, focusing on the economic, environmental, and social history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Japan. His primary region of interest is northern Tohoku (Aomori, Iwate, Akita). For his current project, he is looking at the economic and agricultural development of this region and the creation of what he terms development-induced scarcity. He argues that the reorganization of the economic and agricultural landscape for the benefit of the urbanized and industrialized areas led to the destruction of local ecologies and knowledge, the loss of crop diversity, and the dispossession of lands and commons, creating a cycle of famine, disease, debt and poverty that gripped the region throughout the nineteenth and twentieth-century. His broader research interests include agrarian history, rural history, political economy, political ecology, food studies, marginal groups, and empire.