John W. Dower is an American author and historian. Dower earned a bachelor's degree in American Studies from Amherst College in 1959, and a Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University in 1972, where he studied under Albert M. Craig. He expanded his doctoral dissertation, a biography of former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, into the book Empire and Aftermath. Among his other books is a selection of writings by E. Herbert Norman, a study of mutual images during World War II entitled War Without Mercy, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Embracing Defeat about the... Occupation of Japan. In 2000 Dower was awarded the Mark Lynton History Prize. Dower was the executive producer of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Hellfire, A Journey from Hiroshima, and was a member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, sitting on the editorial board of its journal with Noam Chomsky, and Herbert Bix. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of California, San Diego, and is a Ford International Professor of History at MIT.
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