Department of History

James L. McClain, is Professor and Chair of History, and received his Ph.D. in History from Yale. He has taught the history of early modern Japan at Brown for nearly a quarter century and is author of an award-winning book on Kanazawa: A Castle Town in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Yale University Press, 1982), and more recently a 700-page textbook, Japan: a Modern History, published in 2001 by W.W. Norton. He has further co-edited two volumes on Japanese cities, Edo and Osaka, in addition to articles in important venues. His research has won support over the years from the Japan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.