Kent E. Calder

Director, Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies

Kent E. Calder directs the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and previously served as the school’s Interim Dean in 2021, Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs and International Research Cooperation from 2018 to 2020, and director of Asia Programs from 2016 to 2018. Before arriving at Johns Hopkins SAIS in 2003, he taught for twenty years at Princeton University, and acted as a Visiting Professor at Seoul National University and Lecturer in Government at Harvard University. Dr. Calder has also served as Special Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan (1997-2001), 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 (1979-1980). He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1979, where he worked under the direction of Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer.

A specialist in the political economy of East Asia, Dr. Calder has spent eleven years living and researching in Japan, and four years elsewhere in the region. Some of his major publications include:

• Eurasian Maritime Geopolitics: The United States and China in an Age of Indo-Pacific Transformation (Brookings Institution Press, 2025)
• Global Political Cities: Actors and Arenas of Influence in International Affairs (Brookings Institution Press, 2021)
• Supercontinent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration (Stanford University Press, 2019)
• Circles of Compensation: Economic Growth and the Globalization of Japan (Stanford University Press, 2017)
• Singapore: Smart City, Smart State (Brookings Institution Press, 2016)
• Asia in Washington: Exploring the Penumbra of Transnational Power (Brookings Institution Press, 2014)
• The New Continentalism: Energy and Twenty-First Century Eurasian Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2012)
• Pacific Alliance: Reviving U.S.-Japan Relations (Yale University Press, 2009)
• Embattled Garrisons: Comparative Base Politics and American Globalism (Princeton University, 2007)
• Pacific Defense: Arms, Energy, and America’s Future in Asia (William Morrow and Company, 1996)
• Strategic Capitalism: Private Business and Public Purpose in Japanese Industrial Finance (Princeton University Press, 1993)
• Crisis and Compensation: Public Policy and Political Stability in Japan (Princeton University Press, 1988)