Patricia Maclachlan, who arrived at the University of Texas at Austin in 1997, is Professor of Government and the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Professor of Japanese Studies. She received her Ph.D in political science and Japan studies in 1996 from Columbia University and spent one year as a research associate in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University. Her research interests include consumer politics in advanced industrial democracies, with a focus on Japan, and the history and political economy of the Japanese postal system. Professor Maclachlan is the author of Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Advocacy (NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal Services, 1871-2010 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), and a forthcoming (from Cornell University Press) book on Japanese agricultural reform.  She is also co-editor and contributing author to The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), and has written several articles and book chapters on consumer-related issues in Japan and the West, Japanese civil society, and Japanese postal and agricultural reform.