Kevin Doak

Kevin M. Doak holds the Nippon Foundation Endowed Chair at Georgetown University where he teaches courses on theology, Catholicism in Japan, and the Catholic writer Shusaku Endo in the Theology Department and in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department. He graduated from Quincy University IL (a Franciscan college) and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Previously he has taught at Wake Forest University and The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and been affiliated with Tokai University, Konan University, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, and the Humanities Institute of Kyoto University (all in Japan), and Leiden University, the Netherlands. He is currently an affiliated researcher in The Moralogy Institute of Reitaku University, Japan. Dr. Doak has authored six books, most recently Tanaka Kotaro and World Law: Rethinking the Natural Law Outside the West (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), edited or translated several others, and has written over 80 articles in English and Japanese on modern Japanese culture, religion (especially Catholicism) and jurisprudence. Dr. Doak has been interviewed extensively in the Japanese press and cited by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. His English language publications related to Catholicism have appeared in Nova et Vetera, First Things, The Catholic Thing, Humanities: Christianity and Culture, and Catholic Arts Today as well as in a host of academic journals and books. Dr. Doak is the translator of Miracles, the novel by Japan’s leading Catholic novelist Ayako Sono on Maximilian Kolbe (MerwinAsia, 2016; republished by Wiseblood Books, 2021), and he supervised the translation of Tomei Ozaki, O.F.M. Conv., Father Kolbe in Nagasaki (Academy of the Immaculate, 2021). Dr. Doak is a 3rd Degree Knight of Columbus, a member of the Knights of the Immaculata (M.I.), and a member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.