John W. Dower

John Dower, emeritus professor of Japanese history, retired from the History faculty in 2010 but remains active in MIT Visualizing Cultures: a pioneering website he co-founded with Professor Shigeru Miyagawa in 2002 that breaks new ground in the scholarly use of visual materials to reexamine the experience of Japan and China in the modern world.  As of 2024, eleven of the lengthy presentations on this multi-unit site were authored by him.

Books by Professor Dower include Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999); Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (2010); and Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World (2012).  Awards for Embracing Defeat include the Pulitzer Prize (for general nonfiction), National Book Award (for nonfiction), and Bancroft Prize (for U.S. hisotry).  Professor Dower also was executive producer of a documentary titled Hellfire—A Journey from Hiroshima that was a finalist for an academy award in 1988.

Andrew Gordon

Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. Professor Gordon teaches courses on modern Japanese history with a primary research interest in labor, class, and the social and political history of modern Japan. He is currently working with colleagues in Japan and the United States to create a digital archive of Japan’s March 2011 disasters.

His most recent book, Fabricating Consumers, ex es the making of the modern consumer in 20th century Japan, with a particular focus on the sewing machine.  An earlier book, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (University of California Press, 1991) won the John King Fairbank Prize in 1992 for the best book on modern East Asian history. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1981 in History and East Asian Languages. In 2014 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Shigeru Miyagawa

Miyagawa has been involved with many aspects of digital learning at MIT. He was Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning, 2018 - 2021. He served on the original MIT committee that proposed OpenCourseWare, and was the Chair of the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee, 2010 - 2013. He is also Co-director of Visualizing Cultures with John Dower. With Andrew Gordon of Harvard, Gennifer Weisenfeld of Duke, and Professor Dower, he created Visualizing Japan, a Harvard-MIT MOOC offered by edX that has attracted over 20,000 learners world-wide.

He is also the producer of the multimedia program, StarFestival, which stars George Takei as the voice of the main character. StarFestival was awarded the Distinguished Award at the Multimedia Grandprix 2000 (Japan). During  2014 - 2019, he served as Project Professor and Director of Online Education for the University of Tokyo as a joint appointment with MIT. Since 2019, he has served as an external board member for Cyber University of the SoftBank Group. In April 2022, he was appointed as Executive Advisor to the Seikei University Society 5.0 Research Center.

Gennifer Weisenfeld

Gennifer Weisenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002), and Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012) in addition to co-editing the volume Crossing the Sea: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu, with Gregory Levine and Andrew Watsky (Princeton University Press, 2012), she has written numerous journal articles, including several on the history of Japanese design, such as “‘From Baby’s First Bath’: Kaō Soap and Modern Japanese Commercial Design” (The Art Bulletin, September 2004).

Ellen Sebring

Lead Content Developer for MITx on VJx v1. Ellen Sebring, PhD, is an artist, designer, and new media researcher. She has been the Creative Director of the MIT Visualizing Cultures project since its founding in 2002. She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT, and Post-Doctoral Associate at Duke University. Sebring’s first book— Centerbook: The Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Evolution of Art-Science-Technology at MIT—came out in fall of 2019, co-authored with Elizabeth Goldring. Her essays on image-driven scholarship and history include Civilization & Barbarism: Cartoon Commentary & the “White Man’s Burden” (1898–1902), published by MIT Visualizing Cultures, and reprinted in several academic journals.

As President of Botticelli Interactive (1997-2002) Sebring directed new media development, including the “Titian Kiosk,” awarded The New York Festivals’ World Medal; an interactive television prototype commissioned by the Institute for Civil Society; "Star Festival," Best of Show at MacWorld Expo; and "StarNetwork," starring George Takei, awarded the Distinguished Award at the Multimedia GrandPrix 2000, Tokyo.

Jascha Smilack

Michael Thornton

Lead Content Developer for HarvardX for Visualizing Japan, and teaching fellow for the MITx run of the course in 2016. A native of Kobe and Tokyo, Japan, Michael Thornton is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. He earned his B.A. in History at Yale University, and spent a semester as a visiting student at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His teaching and research interests include early modern and modern Japanese history, urban history, and environmental history. He is currently writing a dissertation on the history of Sapporo in the late nineteenth century. As Course Developer, Michael wrote all of the assessments and course text, and he designed the overall structure of Visualizing Japan. He contributed themes for discussion in video pre-production, edited notes for video post-production, compiled and tracked revisions through beta-testing, and also created the image citations.

Amin Ghadimi

Teaching Fellow for VJx v1. Amin Ghadimi is a doctoral student in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. He specializes in modern Japanese history. His recent research projects have dealt with connections among the local, national, and transnational in the political history of the opening of Kobe as a treaty port; the roles of affect and happenstance in the diplomatic history of the Meiji Restoration; and the relationship between democracy and imperialism in the intellectual history of the radicalization of the Movement for Freedom and Popular Rights. Amin holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Columbia and an M.A. in the same field from Yale. He was born and raised in Kobe.

Maria Kobrina

Maria Kobrina has been a Video Editor at HarvardX since 2014. She previously served as Video Editor and Online Editor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for 7 years, and prior to that was Videographer and Video Editor for The David Project. Maria graduated with a BFA summa cum laude in Film and Writing from Emerson College in 2004.

Alyssa Waln

MIT UROP. I majored in Computer Science at MIT with a minor in Japanese. Interested in UI/UX design. I am the source of bugs in the experimental assessments other than Annotation Tool exercises. I was on the course team for version 1.

Sophie Cao

MIT UROP. Junior majoring in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. I'm interested in languages and language acquisition. For VJx version 1, I worked on putting up text and image content. In my free time, I enjoy making/eating food and sleeping. 

Sylvia Morrison

Video post-production assistant for VJX v1. Sylvia is an independent video producer and editor specializing in educational content. She documented the work of the famous Yoga master, B.K.S. Iyengar, including his 75th birthday celebration in India and produces and distributes DVDs specializing in yoga. In addition, she carries on a family tradition, distributing a unique collection of classic train films produced by her father.

Helen Ho

Project assistant for VJx. Helen is a MIT '19 majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Japanese. She worked on fixing accessibility issues within the course, and updated older features for the 2016 release of the Visualizing Japan course. She is interested in the intersection of technology and culture. 

Andrew Burstein updated the programming for the 2025 release of VJx. Burstein became a member of the MIT Visualizing Cultures team in 2003. As well, he has produced, with many others, multimedia content for consumer products, industry trade shows, and corporate gatherings.

Additional support was provided by MITx and HarvardX administrative and technical teams. Thanks to HarvardX for filming and editing all lecture video for the course. Additional thanks to HarvardX for developing the Image Annotation Tool v1 and v2!