Helen Hardacre facts for kids
Helen Hardacre (born May 20, 1949) is an American Japanologist. This means she is an expert who studies Japan and its culture, history, and people. She is a special professor at Harvard University who teaches about Japanese religions and society.
Biography
Helen Hardacre was born on May 20, 1949, in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Her father, Paul Hoswell Hardacre, was a historian who studied England.
She went to Vanderbilt University for her first two degrees, getting her Bachelor of Arts in 1971 and her Master of Arts in 1972. She then earned her PhD at the University of Chicago, where she studied with a famous scholar named Joseph Kitagawa.
In 1980, she started teaching at Princeton University. She taught there until 1989. After that, she spent two years teaching in Australia at Griffith University. In 1992, she moved to Harvard University and has been there ever since. Today, she is the Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society at Harvard.
From 1995 to 1998, she was the director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. She is very interested in Japanese society and religion. She also studies how possible changes to the Constitution of Japan might affect religion in Japan in the future.
Like her father, Helen Hardacre received a special award called a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. In 2014, she was chosen to be part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is a group of very smart and successful people. In 2018, the Government of Japan gave her a high honor called the Order of the Rising Sun, 3rd Class.
Selected Works
Helen Hardacre has written many books and articles about Japan. Here are some of her important works:
- Lay Buddhism in Contemporary Japan : Reiyūkai Kyōdan (1983)
- The Religion of Japan's Korean Minority : the Preservation of Ethnic Identity (1984)
- Kurozumikyō and the New Religions of Japan (1985)
- Maitreya, the Future Buddha (1988)
- Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (1988)
- Shintō and the State, 1868-1988 (1989)
- Asian Visions of Authority Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia (1994)
- New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan (1997)
- The Postwar Development of Japanese Studies in the United States (1998)
- Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Japan: a Study of the Southern Kantō Region, using late Edo and early Meiji Gazetteers (2002)
- Shinto: A History (2017)
Honours
Order of the Rising Sun, 3rd Class, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon (2018) - This is a high award given by the Japanese government to people who have made great achievements.
