Education:
1981 HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages
1975 HARVARD COLLEGE
A.B. Summa cum laude, East Asian Studies
1973-74 Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, Tokyo
Teaching Experience:
2002- HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History
1995-02 Professor of History
1991-95 DUKE UNIVERSITY
Professor of History
1987-91 Associate Professor of History
1985-87 Assistant Professor of History
1981-85 HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Assistant Professor of History
Books:
2013 Mishin to Nihon no kindai¸ Misuzu Shobō. Translation of Fabricating Consumers (2011)
2013 A Modern History of Japan, 3rd edition. Oxford University Press
2012 Nihon roshi Kankei Shi, Iwanami shoten. A translation of The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan (1985) with two additional chapters covering the period from the 1960s to the present
2011 Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (University of California Press).
2007 Nihonjin ga shiranai Matsuzaka mejaa kakumei [Matsuzaka’s Unknown Major League Revolution] Asahi shinsho
2002 A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present Oxford University Press (translations published in Chinese, Japanese, Korean) [second English edition, fall 2008]
2000 Historical Perspectives on Contemporary East Asia Harvard University Press (co-editor)
1998 The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Press)
1993 Postwar Japan as History (editor), University of California Press. Published in Japanese translation by Misuzu shobo, 2002.
1991 Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, University of California Press (Awarded Fairbank Prize of American Historical Association, 1991 and Arisawa Hiromi Prize Finalist, 1992)
1985 The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853-1955, Harvard East Asian Monographs
Other major publications:
2016 Introduction: The Global E.P. Thompson. Co-authored, with Gabriel Winant, Sven Beckert and Rudi Batzell. Special issue of International Review of Social History 61:1
2015 E. P. Thompson, Politics and History: Writing Social History Fifty Years after The Making of the English Working Class. Co-authored with Rudi Batzell, Sven Beckert and Gabriel Winant. Special issue of Journal of Social History 48: 4 (Summer)
2015 "Making Sense of the Lost Decades: Workplaces and Schools, Men and Women, Young and Old, Rich and Poor," in Yoichi Funabashi and Barak Kushner eds., Examining Japan's Lost Decades. Routledge : Taylor & Francis Group
2012 “Consumption, Consumerism and Japanese Modernity,“ in Frank Trentmann, ed., The Oxford Handbook of The History of Consumption. Oxford University Press
2012 “Like Bamboo Shoots after the Rain: The Growth of a Nation of Dressmakers and Consumers,“ in Penelope Francks, and Janet Hunter, eds., The Historical Consumer: Consumption and Everyday Life in Japan. Palgrave Macmillan
2009 “Selling the American Way: The Singer Sales System in Japan, 1900-1938” Business History Review 82 (Winter 2008)
2007 “Consumption, Leisure and the Middle Class in Transwar Japan,” Social Science Japan Journal (April 2007) Vol. 10, No. 1
2006 “From Sewing Machines to Credit Cards: Consumer Credit in 20th Century Japan,” in Sheldon Garon and Patricia MacClachan, eds, The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West
2006 “Shōhi, seikatsu, goraku no ‘kansen shi’” [A “transwar” history of consumption, daily life, and leisure]. Narita Ryūichi, et. al., eds. Nichijō seikatsu no naka no sōryoku sen [Total war in the midst of daily life], Iwanami kōza: Ajia Taiheyō sensō [Iwanami symposium: The Asia-Pacific War], Vol. 6. Iwanami shoten.
2002 “The Short Happy Life of the Japanese Middle Class,” in Olivier Zunz, Social Contracts Under Stress: the middle classes of America, Europe, and Japan at the turn of the century / edited by Olivier Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari.
1997 “Managing the Japanese Household: The New Life Movement in Postwar Japan” Social Politics (Summer).
1996 “The Disappearance of the Japanese Working Class Movement,” in Elizabeth J. Perry, ed., Putting Class in Its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia, Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies
1994 “Luttes pour pouvoir dans les ateliers: ouvriers et direction dans la siderurgie des annees 50 au Japon,”Annales (May-June, 1994).
1993 “Contests for the Workplace,” in Andrew Gordon, ed., Postwar Japan as History, University of California Press
1989 “The Business Lobby and Bureaucrats in Labor, 1911-1945,” in William Wray, ed., Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan’s Prewar Experience, Council on East Asian Studies,Harvard
1989 “Araki Toichiro and the Shaping of Labor Management” in Yui Tsunehiko, ed. Japanese Management in Historical Perspective, Tokyo University Press
1988 “The Crowd and Politics in Tokyo, 1905-1918,” Past and Present, November. Published in translation inRekishigaku kenkyu, 1987.
1987 “The Right to Work In Japan: Labor and the State in the Depression,” Social Research 54:2 Summer
1986 “Senzen Nankatu chiiki ni okeru rodo kumiai undo no tenkai,” Ohara shakai mondai kenkyujo kenkyu shiryo geppo, February, 1986 [The development of the union movement in the prewar Nankatsu area]
Translations:
1997 The Ashio Riot of 1907 (editor, and translator with Terry Boardman), by Nimura Kazuo (Duke University Press)
1996 Portraits of the Japanese Workplace (editor, and translator with Mikiso Hane), by Kumazawa Makoto (Westview Press)
1992 “Theoretical Displacement of Social Sciences from Chartier to Foucault: Beyond Postmodernism,” by Yamamoto Tetsuji, Iichiki intercultural No. 4
Recent Professional and Administrative Activities:
2014-
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
March 2011-
Co-Director, Japan Disaster Digital Archive Project, Harvard University
January 2011-June 2012
Director, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University
2004-07
Chair, Department of History, Harvard University
1998-2004
Director, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University
1998-2000
Head Tutor, East Asian Studies, Harvard 1994-97 Member, North East Asia Council, Association for Asian Studies (elected position)
1993-94
Member, Asian/Pacific Studies Executive Committee, Duke University
1993-
Member, Joint Committee on Japanese Studies, Social Science Research Council
Permanent Address:
Reischauer Institute
CGIS S236
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA. 02138
Telephone: 617-496-4729
Fax: 617-496-8083
email: agordon [at] fas.harvard.edu
