Ai Hisano, PhD

I'm Associate Professor at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies/Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo, Japan. I specialize in cultural and business history; studies in capitalism; the long-term development of technology; and the history of the senses.

I received a BA and MA in American Studies from the University of Tokyo, Japan, and a PhD in History from the Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture at the University of Delaware.​ After earning my PhD in 2016, I served as a Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School (2016–17), and taught at the Graduate School of Economics at Kyoto University (2017–2021).

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My first book, Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat (Harvard University Press, 2019) won the 2020 Hagley Prize in Business History (Business History Conference) and the 2020 Shimizu Hiroshi Book Award (Japanese Association for American Studies).