BOARD MEMBERS

Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics Emerita, Harvard University

Dr. Pharr is the Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics Emerita at the Department of Government, Harvard University.  At Harvard she was director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Dr. Pharr served as chair of the Government Department (1992-95); Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (1996-98); and Director of the Reischauer Institute, 2004-10. She was also a member of the WCFIA Executive Committee and a Senior Scholar of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies.

Professor Pharr received her Ph.D. in 1975 from Columbia University in political science. From 1974-76, she served as Staff Associate at the Social Sciences Research Council, and from 1977 to 1986, she was on the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 1985-87, on a leave from Wisconsin, she held the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has been a visiting scholar or fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo and Keio University; St. Antony's College, Oxford; the Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars; and the Brookings Institution. She also has served as a Senior Social Scientist with the U.S. Agency for International Development. In 2016, she received the Japan Foundation Prize for her contribution to Japanese Studies.

In 2008 the government of Japan conferred on Dr. Pharr the decoration of the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon.