Profile: Meet Professor Ken Ruoff

Dr. Ruoff's specialty is modern Japanese history. He graduated with honors from Harvard College, and received his Ph.D. in Japanese history from Columbia University.

From 1994 to 1996, he was a member of the Faculty of Law at Hokkaido University, where he taught, in Japanese, a seminar on Japan's modern history. After a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard University, he joined PSU.

Dr. Ruoff teaches courses about Japanese history, Japanese-American relations, the Japanese-American experience, and modernity. His publications include The People's Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995 (Harvard University Press, 2001). The Japanese translation of The People's Emperor, Kokumin no tenno (Kyodo News Publications, 2003), was awarded the Jiro Osaragi Prize for Commentary in 2004. This prize, which recognizes the best book in the social sciences published during the previous year in Japan, is equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize in the United States.

His present project is a book-length manuscript about Japan in 1940 tentatively titled "Mid-Century Modernity: The 2600th Anniversary Celebrations of the Empire of Japan, 1940." Research for this project was supported by a Fulbright Grant that allowed Dr. Ruoff to conduct field research in 2004 while affiliated with Kyoto University.

632 SW Hall St. (EH 311)
Portland, OR 97207
503-725-3991
ruoffk@post.harvard.edu