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Kent CALDER is Director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. Before arriving at SAIS in 2003, he taught for twenty years at Princeton University, and also as Visiting Professor at Seoul National University, and Lecturer on Government at Harvard University.

Calder has served as Special Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan (1997-2001), working under Walter Mondale and Thomas Foley; Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (1989-1993 and 1996); and as the first Executive Director of Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, during 1979-1980. Calder received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1979, where he worked under the director of Edwin O. Reischauer. He also has held staff positions with the U.S. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission and has served as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1990.  His undergraduate degree is from the University of Utah. A specialist in Japanese trade and industrial policy, he has focused on how politics and social structure affect the Japanese economy. Since 1990, he has directed the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

A specialist in East Asian political economy, Calder has spent eleven years living and researching in Japan, and four years elsewhere in East Asia.

Calder is the author of numbers of books and articles. In particular, his book Pacific Defense is the first publication by an American to receive the Mainichi Grand Prix in Asia-Pacific Studies in 1997 for its analysis of how economic change is transforming the U.S.-East Asia security equation. His works have been translated into foreign languages including Japanese and Korean.  Calder’s first book, The Eastasia Edge, co-authored with Roy Hofheinz, Jr., (Basic Books, 1982), was one of the early studies of comparative East Asian public policy, based on a seminar first co-taught with Hofheinz at Harvard in the fall of 1979. He has also written extensively on Asian energy geopolitics and U.S.-Japan relations, including Pacific Alliance (Yale, 2009).