James Eldin Reed: Pacific Northwest Renaissance

JAMES ELDIN REED, Boston, Massachusetts. Historian, consultant, educator. Ph.D., Harvard University.

James Eldin Reed was born March 13, 1945, in Walla Walla, Washington, and received his Ph.D. in American and international history at Harvard in 1976.

At Harvard he studied with the legendary John King Fairbank, one of the great scholar-teachers of that generation, and with the intellectual and cultural historians William R. Hutchison and H. Stuart Hughes. He served an apprenticeship with yet another notable interpreter of Cultural Modernism, Norman F. Cantor. And he took a degree in religious studies at the Harvard Divinity School.

James Reed is the author or editor of several books, beginning with A Select Bibliography of History (Harvard, 1971) and, most recently, The American Canada Watch: A Northern Miscellany (2008). Arguably his most influential work to date, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy (Harvard University Press, 1983), is a pioneering study of the role of religion in international politics.

The Missionary Mind, which is still in print, received wide notice and general acclaim in major review media in this country and overseas. Here is a sampling of the critical reception:

“Eloquent”—The Times Literary Supplement

“Gratifying”—The Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Extremely readable and provocative”—American Historical Review

“Persuasively supports its central thesis”—Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Of his work-in-progress, Pacific Northwest Renaissance, the author begins by saying simply, “This may well be my ‘big book.’”

Then he adds, “It has taken me several years to write, but a good deal of my life to live. I was born and raised in the Northwest—‘East of the Mountains,' in the deep interior, where the frontier past still lingered—and came to know the region intimately as only a child can. Crucially, I studied in Seattle, at Shoreline High School, in the early 1960s, when the Northwest Modernists were at their creative peak."

"Later, at Harvard, this ‘local knowledge’ was enriched by years of advanced study and research, by immersion in the university’s unique tradition of American Studies, and by familiarity with Harvard’s pivotal role in the history of Modernism in America.”

Jim Reed has been a Fellow of the Newberry Library in Chicago, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Harvard Graduate Prize Fellow, and the holder of a Fulbright Distinguished Chair overseas. He is currently a Fulbright Senior Specialist in American Studies. In 2007 he delivered the Fulbright Lectures on American Civilization at the University of Tirana in Albania.

At present he is a Fellow of the Harvard Divinity School, where he is a longtime member of the Colloquium on North American Religion. And he serves as President of the Massachusetts Fulbright Association, representing the largest concentration of Fulbright Scholars in the world.

The link to his author website, maintained by the Authors Guild, is listed at left. His bio can be found in the current edition of the Marquis Who’s Who in America.

James Reed lives with his wife of twenty-five years, Deborah Addis, in Brookline, Massachusetts.