HELEN HARDACRE
Reischauer Institute Research Professor of Japanese Religions and Society
Helen Hardacre is Reischauer Institute Research Professor of Japanese Religions and Society, Harvard University, Emerita. Her publications include The Religion of Japan's Korean Minority (1984), Lay Buddhism in Contemporary Japan: Reiyukai Kyodan (1984), Kurozumikyo and the New Religions of Japan (1986), Shinto and the State, 1868-1988 (1989), Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (1997), Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2002), Shinto, A History (2016), Constitutional Revision and Civic Activism in Japan (lead editor and contributor, 2021), and Shinto Shrines in Prewar and Wartime Japan (2025). She earned her Ph.D. from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in History of Religions in 1980 and began teaching at Harvard in 1992. Among her academic awards since 2000 are the following: John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2003-04), Walter Channing Cabot Fellow (Harvard University, 2017), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received the Order of the Rising Sun in 2018.