Harry Harootunian spent most of his career teaching history and East Asian studies at the University of Chicago, where he is Max Palevsky Professor of History Emeritus. He is now adjunct senior research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University, where he teaches a graduate course. He has published on various periods of Japan's intellectual and cultural history and on questions of Marxism and historical writing. He is also the author of History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life and Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan.
