Dower receives Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award

On December 17, 2004, Professor John Dower, Ford International Professor of History in SHASS, received a 2004 Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. According to the Mellon Foundation web site, the Mellon awards "honor scholars who have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry and enable them to teach and do research under especially favorable conditions."

Dower—whose book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—is one of the foremost scholars on modern Japan and US-Japanese relations. Together with Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, Dower has been working on an on-line archive of Japanese drawings, prints, and photographs that document Japan's opening to the Western world in the 19th century. This project, which has already resulted in a course called "Visualizing Cultures," offered through MIT OpenCourseWare, has received support from the D'Arbeloff Fund, and will be a prime beneficiary of the Mellon Award.

Among other things, Dower plans to develop a new database for visual materials, and expand the number of research assistants and software designers working on the project. The award will provide up to $1.5 million over a three-year period to support humanistic programs and activities at MIT.

Unlike other awards by which the monetary grant is allocated directly to the named individual, the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Awards recognize the interdependence of academics and institutions by supporting institutional programs that will aid teaching and research.

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