Yasushi Watanabe

Yasushi Watanabe (1967-) is Professor at Keio University in Japan.

He earned a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 1997. After a post-doctoral research at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, he joined Keio University's Faculty of Environment and Information Studies and Graduate School of Media and Governance in 1999, and as a full Professor, is presently working on such subjects as Cultural Policy, Cultural Diplomacy and American Studies.

His early books include After America: Trajectories of the Bostonians and the Politics of Culture (2004, in Japanese), which won a prestigious Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities and a Hiroshi Shimizu Award of the Japanese Association for American Studies, and The American Family: Across the Class Divide (2005). During the 2003-04 academic years, he was a recipient of an Abe Fellowship, which he held at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

He was awarded a most prestigious Japan Academy Medal in 2005. He served as a Fellow at Downing College, University of Cambridge in 2007.

His most resent books includes American Community: Between the State and the Individual (2007), American Center: International Cultural Strategies of the United States (2008), Soft Power Superpowers: Cultural and National Assets of Japan and the United States (2008, Co-editor, with Preface by Professor Joseph Nye, Jr.).

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