William W. Grimes

             

I have been a faculty member in the Department of International Relations at Boston University since 1996.  I am currently a tenured associate professor, as well as the associate chair of the department.  In past years, I have served as director of graduate studies and on various departmental and college committees.  At BU, I am also an affiliate of the Department of Political Science and am active in East Asian Studies.  In addition, I have been affiliated with Harvard University’s Program on US-Japan Relations and Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies since I spent a post-doctoral year at the former in 1995-96, and I am the coordinator of the Reischauer Institute’s Contemporary Japanese Politics Study Group.

My main focus of both research and teaching is East Asian political economy.  My interest in the region was first sparked when I moved to Tokyo, Japan with my family at the age of 13.  I attended the American School in Japan for four years, then returned to the United States to attend Yale University, where I majored in East Asian Studies, while spending my summers back in Tokyo.  After another year back in Tokyo, during which I studied Japanese and had part-time jobs in the office of Representative Kazuo Aichi (a Dietmember from Sendai) and at the research institute of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, I entered graduate school at Princeton University, earning an MPA in International Relations (with a focus on economics) and a PhD in Politics.  I spent another year in Japan during that time, doing fieldwork on my dissertation (“From the Plaza to the Bubble:  Japan’s Response to International Economic Policy Coordination, 1985-88”) at the University of Tokyo, the research institute of the Ministry of Finance, and the Foundation for Advanced Information and Research.  Since then, I have returned to Japan regularly for research, conferences, and invited lectures.  All in all, I figure I have spent about eight years there.  In addition to Japan, I lived for a summer doing research for the US Embassy in the Philippines and have traveled widely throughout East Asia.

I used to have hobbies, including skiing and traveling, but I have had to put them temporarily on hold since the birth of my daughter in 2002.  I also have a son, born in 2005.  My wife, Melinda Stanford, is a singer, songwriter and vocal coach.  After living in Cambridge, Massachusetts for five and a half years, we moved to Brookline in 2001.