William W. Kelly (Ph.D., Brandeis 1980) is Professor and Chairman of Anthropology at Yale University. He is a noted authority on the social and historical anthropology of Japan. Kelly has focused much of his research in the last two decades on regional agrarian societies in Japan. Since 1996, however, Kelly has been conducting field research on the history and present patterns of professional baseball in the cities of Osaka and Kobe. Kelly is now finishing a historical ethnography of one of the Kansai baseball clubs, the Hanshin Tigers, titled The Hanshin Tigers and the Practices of Professional Baseball in Modern Japan. He is also co-editing This Sporting Life: Sports and Body Culture in Modern Japan with Atsuo Sugimoto of Kyoto University of Education and Fanning the Flames: Fandoms and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan.