Frederick Dickinson

Frederick R. Dickinson is a Professor of Japanese History at the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies. Dickinson specializes in modern Japanese as well as East Asian diplomatic history. He has written books and has had papers published on a multitude of topics related to his area of concentration. He holds degrees from both Kyoto University and Yale University, where he received his Ph.D. in History.

Dickinson holds an M.A. in International Politics from Kyoto University (Kyoto, Japan, 1986) and an M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1993) in History from Yale University. He currently teaches courses in the University of Pennsylvania Department of History on modern Japan, East Asian diplomacy, as well as politics and nationalism in Asia. He also directs the Master of Arts track within the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies. The Japanese Ministry of Education, the Fulbright Commission and the Japan Foundation have all conferred grants upon him, and he was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford University, 2000-1) and Visiting Research Scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Kyoto, 2011–12). He has held visiting professorships at Swarthmore College, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), Kyoto University, and Kwansei Gakuin University. Dickinson has also served as Acting Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at his home institution, Penn (2008-9).

Dickinson authored War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914-1919 (Harvard, 1999) and, in the Japanese language, Taisho Tenno (Taisho Emperor, Minerva, 2009). His book World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919-1931 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.

Dickinson was born in Tokyo, and raised in Kanazawa and Kyoto, all in Japan.