He is a professor of Japanese studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
[1] He was the Chair of Berkeley's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.
[4][5] Tansman was a former co-chair of the editorial board of Representations, an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities published quarterly by the University of California Press.
[6] He was also a former director of Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities.
[7][8] In 2019, he was suspended by Berkeley for a two-year term after being accused of sexual harassment by a former student.