Akira Iriye

Akira Iriye is a professor of history at Harvard Umiversity specializing in U.S.-Japan relations in the 20th century. Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1934, he graduated from a Tokyo high school in 1953. Four years later, he received a B.A. from Haverford College. He went on to receive a Ph.D. in U.S. and East Asian History from Harvard in 1961.

He became an Instructor and Lecturer in history at Harvard following receipt of his Ph.D. and then taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago before accepting an appointment as Professor of History at Harvard University in 1989.

In 1991, when he became Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, Iriye came full circle, returning to the place where he began his historical career. Over the years, Iriye has written widely on American diplomatic history and Japanese-American relations. Among those works are Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897-1911 (1972); Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945 (1981); Fifty Years of Japanese-American Relations (in Japanese, 1991); China and Japan in the Global Setting (1992); The Globalizing of America (1993); and Cultural Internationalism an World Order (1997). He has served as president of both the American Historical Association and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Yoshida Shigeru Prize for “best book in public history,” in Japan, a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, and a Guggenheim fellowship.