DR. GERMAINE A. HOSTON

Dr. Hoston is Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Using historical and theoretical approaches, she teaches and does research on Japanese and Chinese political and economic development. Fluent in Japanese, Chinese, French, and Spanish, and working abilities in German, Russian, Biblical Greek, and Latin, Dr. Hoston is a graduate with highest honors of Princeton University, and earned her Master's and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.

She is the author of a seminal study of Japan's political economy from Meiji through Showa, published by Princeton University Press (Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan). She has just published a comparative study of nationalism and the quest for modernity in radical thought and practice in twentieth-century Japan and China (The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan, Princeton University Press, 1994). She has also published extensively in scholarly journals on political theory and comparative political development. In the field of political theory, she teaches Western political thought from Rousseau to Habermas and Eastern political thought from Confucius to Mao.

In her current work, Dr. Hoston seeks to engage non-Western interlocutors into the Western discourse on the nature of modernity. She is particularly intrested in the relationship between the role of state institutions in economic development and individualist and communitarian liberal bases of democracy. A current research project focuses on the relationship between Japan's rapid economic industrialization and the challenges that remain for the development of civil society and democratic politics in postwar Japan.

Dr. Hoston has served as a member of the Executive Council of the American Political Science Association and an officer of the Association for Asian Studies. She serves on the boards of several academic and community organizations, including the Virginia Theological Seminary, the American Advisory Committee of the Japan Foundation, the Asia Society, the Standing Commission on Human Affairs of the national Episcopal Church of the United States, and the Institute for EastWest Studies, New York and Prague, where she has stressed the integral character of Atlantic and Pacific security concerns in the new world order. She is Chair of the Competing Modernities in Twentieth-Century Japan Conference Series, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the founding Director of the Center for Democratization and Economic Development (CDED) at UCSD.