DAVID L. HOWELL
Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History;
Interim Chair, Committee on Regional Studies: East Asia
David L. Howell is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History, Professor of History, and Interim Chair of the Committee on Regional Studies: East Asia. Originally from Hilo, Hawai‘i, he received his B.A. from the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, after which he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2010, he taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1989 to 1992 and Princeton University from 1993 to 2010.
A historian of early modern Japanese history, Professor Howell is the author of Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (University of California Press, 1995), Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (University of California Press, 2005), and The Meiji Restoration: Japan’s Gradual, Then Sudden, Revolution (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2028). He is the editor of the New Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 2: Early Modern Japan in Asia and the World (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Professor Howell's research focuses on the social history of Japan in the Tokugawa (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. He is particularly interested in the ways that changing political and economic institutions affected the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people over the course of the nineteenth century. His current projects include a history of human waste and garbage in the cities of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan.