Mireya Solís Named Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies at Brookings

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Mireya Solís, an expert on Japanese political economy, has joined the Brookings Institution as the inaugural Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies, Brookings President Strobe Talbott announced today. Solís will serve as a senior fellow in the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies (CNAPS) in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings.

The Knight Chair in Japan Studies has been established by a generous gift from Philip Knight to promote stronger U.S.-Japan relations and increase understanding in Washington of the issues facing Japan.  Mr. Knight, the founder and Chairman of Nike, Inc., was elected to the Brookings Board of Trustees in 2008. The Knight Chair is also supported by a generous operating grant from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

“We are delighted to have Dr. Solís join Brookings and to be the first scholar to occupy the Knight Chair in Japan Studies,” said Martin Indyk, vice president and director of Foreign Policy at Brookings. “Mireya brings incredible depth of knowledge of Japan’s politics and economy, as well as U.S.-Japan relations. We are very grateful to Phil Knight for his generosity and foresight in endowing a chair focusing on this important policy area, and to the Japan Foundation for operating funds that will enable us to undertake programming in Japan policy studies.”

Mireya Solís joins Brookings from American University in Washington, D.C., where she has been an associate and assistant professor in the School of International Service since 2003. Her main research interests include Japanese politics, political economy, and foreign policy; international and comparative political economy; international relations; and government-business relations. She also has interests in broader issues in U.S.-Japan relations and East Asian multilateralism. Solís’s research on Japan’s political economy attempts to explain the coexistence of state-led growth practices with Japan’s industrial growth policies. She also gives important attention to domestic determinants of Japan’s foreign economic and trade policies.

Solís is the author of Banking on Multinationals: Public Credit and the Export of Japanese Sunset Industries (Stanford University Press, 2004) and co-editor of Cross-Regional Trade Agreements: Understanding Permeated Regionalism in East Asia (Springer, 2008) and Competitive Regionalism: FTA Diffusion in the Pacific Rim (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on implications of and responses to the recent economic crisis, Japan’s domestic politics and foreign and economic policies, and East Asian multilateralism. Dr. Solís earned a Ph.D. in government and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, and a B.A. in international relations from El Colegio de México.