Richard J. Samuels

Richard J. Samuels (born November 2, 1951) is an American academic, political scientist, author, Japanologist, Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Samuels was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Westbury on Long Island. He graduated from Colgate University in 1973, received his master's degree from Tufts University in 1974, and was awarded his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.

Samuels's teaching career at MIT has been interrupted periodically for visiting professorships in Tokyo, Rome, Berlin, and elsewhere. He served as head of the MIT Department of Political Science between 1992 and 1997. Samuels has also served as vice-chairman of the Committee on Japan of the National Research Council, and as chairman of the Japan-US Friendship Commission, an independent federal grant-making agency that supports Japanese studies and policy-oriented research in the United States. He served concurrently as the chair of the U.S. CULCON Panel (U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange), a binational advisory panel to the U.S. and Japanese governments. In 2005 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2011 he received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, an imperial decoration awarded by the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese Prime Minister. He is one of only three scholars (Japanese or foreign) to have produced more than one scholarly monograph recognized by the Nippon Foundation as one of the top "one hundred books for understanding contemporary Japan". In 2015 he was named an Einstein Fellow at the Free University of Berlin.

Currently Samuels is director of MIT Center for International Studies.

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Richard Samuels, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 90+ publications in 4 languages and 3,000+ library holdings

...
Wikipedia