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David L. Howell is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History and Professor of History at Harvard University. He received his BA from the University of Hawai'i at Hilo and PhD in History from Princeton University. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin and Princeton before joining the Harvard faculty in 2010. Howell is the author of Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995) and Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2005) as well as numerous articles, reviews, and other publications in English and Japanese. He is the editor of The New Cambridge History of Japan, volume 2, Early Modern Japan in Asia and the World (2024), and served as editor of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies from 2014 to 2024.
Howell's research focuses on the social history of Japan in the Tokugawa (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. He is particularly interested in the ways changing political and economic institutions affected the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people over the course of the nineteenth century. His current projects include a short survey of the Meiji Restoration period and a history of human waste and garbage in the cities of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan.