Morgan Pitelka is the Bernard L. Herman Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with joint appointments in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of History. He is a historian of medieval and early modern Japan who focuses on material culture, environmental history, and urban history. His new project is an environmental and cultural history of early modern Kyoto. His most recent book, Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2022) was named one of the ten best humanities books in Asian Studies by the International Convention of Asia Scholars and received the honorable mention for the John Whitney Hall Book Prize in Japanese Studies.