Helen Hardacre

Helen Hardacre (born May 20, 1949) is an American Japanologist. She was the Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilization, Harvard University. She currently is a Havard Emeritus Professor in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department. She received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts (1972) at Vanderbilt University, and completed her PhD at University of Chicago, studying under Joseph Kitagawa. Her interests include Japanese society and religion and the ramifications of potential constitutional amendments on the future of religion in Japan.

She, like her father, a Los Angeles-born historian of Britain, would be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship (2003). In 2014, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018, she was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun 3rd Class Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon from the Government of Japan.

Lay Buddhism in Contemporary Japan : Reiyūkai Kyōdan (1983) The Religion of Japan's Korean Minority : the Preservation of Ethnic Identity (1984) Kurozumikyō and the New Religions of Japan (1985) Maitreya, the Future Buddha (1988) Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (1988) Shintō and the State, 1868-1988 (1989) Asian Visions of Authority Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia (1994) New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan (1997) The Postwar Development of Japanese Studies in the United States (1998) Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Japan: a Study of the Southern Kantō Region, using late Edo and early Meiji Gazetteers (2002) Shinto: A History (2017) Shinto Shrines in Prewar and Wartime Japan (2025)

Honours