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.

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.

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.

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).