James Eldin Reed: Author Website

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 from 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 H. Stuart Hughes and William R. Hutchison. He also took a degree in religious studies at the Harvard Divinity School.

His first book, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, was published by the Harvard University Press in 1983. A pioneering study of the relationship between religion and international politics, it received wide notice in major review media as well as in numerous scholarly publications.

In subsequent years he has published articles and reviews in the fields of history, politics, and international affairs in a variety of publications, including the Boston Globe, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Major publications include A Select Bibliography of History (also published by Harvard) and The American Canada Watch: A Northern Miscellany (e-book, 2008).

In the course of a thirty-year career, James Reed—Jim as he is universally known—has divided his time between the academic world and the world of affairs. He has held appointments at Harvard University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and has twice received Fulbright grants for teaching and research at foreign universities.

He is founding principal of Addis & Reed Consulting, a well-regarded international consultancy based in Boston. As a consultant he has had experience of government and politics at all levels, from municipal to state to national to international, and deep engagement with the nonprofit sector. And he has extensive working knowledge of business and the professions. His bio can be found in the current edition of Who’s Who in America.

Jim has been a Fellow of the Newberry Library in Chicago, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and a Harvard Graduate Prize Fellow. In September 2007 he was chosen to deliver 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 serves as President of the Massachusetts Fulbright Association.

His current Work-in-Progress is a cultural history of the Pacific Northwest. Tentatively titled "Pacific Northwest Renaissance: Religion and Cultural Modernism in an Unfinished Landscape," the book-length project focuses on the brilliant circle of poets and painters, many of them internationally celebrated, who together produced a unique cultural flowering on the Northwest coast in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

In brief, it evokes the lost world of the Northwest Modernists. Included in the work are portraits of the painters Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and Emily Carr, of the poets Theodore Roethke and William Stafford, and of the writers Malcolm Lowry and Mary McCarthy.

Comprehensive, critical, and transnational in range,
"Pacific Northwest Renaissance" is a panoramic account of a luminous yet half-forgotten movement in American cultural life. Though a work of general nonfiction and conceived to be marketed as a trade book, several chapters from "Pacific Northwest Renaissance" have been presented in Harvard seminars on American religion and culture.

A Work-in-Progress website can be found at www. northwest-renaissance.us. A detailed prospectus of the work is available from the author.

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

Contact: jimreed@post.harvard.edu

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