Akira Iriye

Historian Akira Iriye is regarded as one of foremost scholars of international history. Originally 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 re ceive a Ph.D. in U.S. and East Asian History from Harvard in 1961. He was an Instructor and Lecturer in history at Harvard following receipt of his Ph.D. He 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, where he became Charles Warren Professor of American History in 1991. Professor 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.