Dr David L. Howell

David L. Howell is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History and Professor of History at Harvard University. He received his BA from the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo and PhD in History from Princeton University. Howell is the author of Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995) and Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2005), as well as numerous articles. He is editor of The New Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 2, Early Modern Japan in Asia and the World, c. 1580–1877 (2024). He is particularly interested in the ways changing political and economic institutions affected the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people over the course of the nineteenth century. His most recent publication is “The Strange Case of the Castaway Princess and Other Stories of Japan in the Pacific,” in Stepfan Huebner et al., eds., Oceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Pacific and Global History (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2025). While at St. Antony’s he will complete a social history of the Meiji Restoration and continue work on a history of excrement in early modern and modern Japan.