John W. Dower

John W. Dower is an American historian of modern Japan whose work examines war, memory and the encounter between Japan and the United States. He studied at Amherst College and earned his doctorate at Harvard University, and he taught Japanese history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is Ford International Professor of History emeritus. At MIT he helped create Visualizing Cultures, a project that uses images to teach history.

War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986) was a National Book Award finalist. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999), his history of the American occupation, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His later books include Cultures of War (2010), also a National Book Award finalist, and Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (2012).