Jon Thares Davidann

Jon Thares Davidann is a U.S.-East Asian historian specializing in intellectual history. He is professor and Chair of Department of History, Humanities and International Studies at Hawai'i Pacific University.

Career He began his career at Hawai'i Pacific University in 1997. He also served as the Director of Exchange and Study Abroad Programs at HPU for five years from 2007–2012. His residence in the multicultural milieu of Hawai'i and many travels to East Asia convinced him that traditional narratives of westernization were Eurocentric and mistaken.

As a result, in 2019, he published The Limits of Westernization: American and East Asian Intellectuals Create Modernity, 1860–1960, an extended critique of westernization. The work won the Kenneth Baldridge Prize in 2020.

Davidann published the essay "The Myth of Westernization" in Aeon Magazine in 2021.

Davidann has published six books and 30 articles and essays. He has served as a visiting fellow at Oxford University and as a Fulbright Specialist at Ghent University in Ghent, Belgium and is affiliated researcher there. He has given numerous keynote and invited lectures internationally.

He has served as guest editor of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations.

Davidann hosts a video podcast, History Lens, that discusses current concerns such as impeachment, white supremacy, immigration, gun control, and taxes, and puts them in historical perspective.

Books

Trans-Pacific Relations: America, Europe, and Asia in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jon Davidann, Richard Jensen, and Yone Sugita, 2003.