Shigehisa Kuriyama

Who is Shigehisa Kuriyama?

Shigehisa Kuriyama is a Japanologist and historian of medicine, the Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History at Harvard University.

Kuriyama studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, and then Harvard, receiving an A.B. degree from Harvard's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 1977 and an A.M. degree in 1978. He then moved to Harvard's Department of the History of Science, which awarded him a Ph.D. in 1986. He joined the Harvard faculty as Reischauer Professor in 2005, after previously working at the University of New Hampshire, Emory University, and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan.

He is the author of the book The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, a study of the different views of health and medicine held by the ancient western and eastern civilizations. This book was the 2001 winner of the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine.