Andrew D. Gordon

Andrew D. Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. His teaching and research focus primarily on modern Japan. He has also taught courses on the premodern history of Japan, the comparative history of labor, and the United States as a colonial power and nation builder. He has written, edited, and translated numerous books and has published articles in journals in the United States, Japan, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. His most recent monograph, Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2011), examines the making of the modern consumer in 20th-century Japan, using the sewing machine as window into that story. This book was translated into Japanese and published by Misuzu Shobo in 2013. Professor Gordon has also recently published several articles on the historical context of Japan's so-called “Lost Decades” from the 1990s through the 2010s, and during the pandemic he published a co-authored article with Michael Reich on the history of vaccination and vaccination hesitancy in Japan, as well as several blog postings on Japanese policies and societal responses to COVID-19. In 2023, he contributed a chapter titled “Japan’s Transwar Political Economy” in the third volume of The New Cambridge History of Japan: The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c. 1868 to the Twenty-First Century, and in 2025, he co-edited a volume titled Public History in Japan: Theory and Practice. He is currently completing a book tentatively titled Making Modern Memories: Industrial Heritage in Japan.

Professor Gordon’s first book was The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853-1955 (Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies Monographs, 1985). A Japanese translation and expanded edition was published by Iwanami Shoten in 2012, with two additional chapters covering the period from the 1960s to the present. His second book, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (University of California Press, 1991), won the John King Fairbank Prize in 1992 for the best book on modern East Asian history, and was a finalist for the 1992 Arisawa Hiromi Prize for the best book on Japan. He later wrote The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2011). His textbook, A Modern History of Japan (Oxford University Press), which is widely used in college classes, was originally published in 2002, with subsequent editions in 2008, 2013, and 2020. He is currently preparing a fifth edition for publication in 2027.

Combining the perspectives of a fan and an academic, in 2007 he published (in Japanese only) The Unknown Story of Matsuzaka’s Major League Revolution (Asahi shinsho, 2007), a book tracking Daisuke Matsuzaka’s first season with the Boston Red Sox and placing it in a cross-cultural and historical context. He also edited the book Postwar Japan as History (University of California Press, 1993), published in Japanese in 2002, and he translated Portraits of the Japanese Workplace by Kumazawa Makoto (Westview Press, 1996) and The Ashio Copper Mine Riot by Nimura Kazuo (Duke University Press, 1997).

In 2011, while serving as director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Professor Gordon led the Institute in founding the Japan Disasters Digital Archive, a digital archive project that aims to preserve the vast array of digital records concerning the March 11, 2011, disaster in Japan and its aftermath. The archive makes those records available to a global community of citizens, students, and scholars in close partnership with many organizations in Japan, including the National Diet Library and Tohoku University.

Professor Gordon has served as Chair of the Harvard History Department (2004-07), Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies (1998-2004 and 2010-2011), Acting Director of the Asia Center (2016-2017), and Acting Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2018-19). He has also been a member of the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (1994-97) and the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies (1994-1996). Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1995, he was a faculty member of the history department at Duke University for ten years. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1981 in History and East Asian Languages after completing a B.A. from Harvard in 1975.

Professor Gordon has traveled numerous times to Japan, including a year of language study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies and ten extended research trips, for a total of roughly 10 years living in Japan. These visits were supported by fellowships from the Fulbright program, the Japan Foundation, the Center for Global Partnership, and the Social Science Research Council, as well as visiting teaching appointments at Hosei University and Tokyo University. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale in Paris and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies. Since 2024, when in Japan, he has been an Ushioda Fellow (visiting scholar) at Tokyo College, an institute of advanced study at Tokyo University.

In 2014, Professor Gordon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in 2014, for his contributions to the development of Japanese Studies in the United States, and the National Institute for the Humanities Prize in Japanese Studies in 2020, for his broad-ranging research activities on Japanese modern and contemporary history.