William M. Tsutsui was born, July 9, 1963 in New York City, New York, USA, and grew up in Bryan, Texas.
Mr. Tsutsui is an American academic, author, economic historian, Japanologist and university administrator. In 2021, Tsutsui was named President and CEO of Ottawa University, a comprehensive, not-for-profit educational institution, serving more than 4,000 students through its residential campuses in Ottawa, Kansas, and Surprise, Arizona, and adult campuses in Overland Park, Kansas; Phoenix, Arizona; Brookfield, Wisconsin; and online.
Tsutsui earned his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from Harvard University. In 1985, he was awarded an A.B. degree in East Asian Studies. Tsutsui earned his Ph.D. in history at Princeton University in 1995. In 1988, Oxford University's Corpus Christi College, where he was a Marshall Scholar, awarded him a Master of Letters in Modern Japanese History. In 1990, Princeton awarded him an M.A. in history. In 1991-1992, he was a visiting research scholar at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo before returning to Princeton to complete his doctoral dissertation.
Tsutsui served as Dean of Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas from 2010 to 2014. He was also Professor in SMU's Clements Department of History. Previously, he had been a faculty member in the History Department at the University of Kansas from 1993 through 2010. At Kansas he served as Acting Director of the Center for East Asian Studies, Founding Executive Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Kansas, Chair of the History Department, and Associate Dean for International Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
His first book on the giant lizard, called Godzilla On My Mind, earned him his nickname, recalls Tsutsui's wife, Marjorie Swann. "Often his students had trouble pronouncing his last name ... so they'd call him Professor Godzilla," Swann says.
