John W. Dower is the author of Accepting Defeat, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, as well as War Without Mercy, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Cultures of War, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a history professor emeritus at MIT. He is the founder and codirector of the online Visualizing Cultures project, which was founded at MIT in 2002 and is committed to the presentation of image-driven scholarship on East Asia in the modern world. He has written numerous books and articles about Japan and the United States in war and peace. He is a resident of Boston, Massachusetts.