John W. Dower

Professor John W. Dower was the former Ford International Professor of History, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also held teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and University of California, San Diego. Although he retired from M.I.T. in 2010, he remains active in M.I.T.'s online "Visualizing Cultures" project, a pioneering website he co-founded in 2002 that breaks new ground in the scholarly use of visual materials to reexamine the experience of Japan and China in the modern world. Professor Dower also was executive producer of a documentary titled Hellfire---A Journey from Hiroshima that was a finalist for an academy award in 1988. His major publications draw on Japanese and English-language resources to examine Japan’s emergence as a modern state in a turbulent global milieu. He is particularly known for his writings on the Pacific War, as well as on the dynamics of starting over in a shattered land in the first decade that followed Japan’s defeat; and also for his use of visual images as a vibrant resource for enhancing our historical understanding of Asia in the modern world. His most notable book was Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II in 1999, which won Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Bancroft Prize, and Fairbank Prize.