Ellis S. Krauss was born in 1944 in Memphis, Tennessee, but grew up in New York City and received his B.A. from Brooklyn College CUNY. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, and since 1996 has been a Professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to that he taught for 25 years at the University of Pittsburgh and Western Washington University.

A specialist on postwar Japanese politics and U.S.-Japan relations, Krauss has authored or co-edited six books on Japan, including Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News (2000), Media and Politics in Japan (coeditor, Susan Pharr); Democracy in Japan (1990; coeditor, Takeshi Ishida) and Conflict in Japan (1984; coeditors, Thomas Rohlen and Patricia Steinhoff). His dissertation, Japanese Radicals Revisited: Student Protest in Postwar Japan, was published by the University of California Press in 1974. He recently published an edited volume with T.J.Pempel, Beyond Bilateralism: U.S.-Japan Relations in the New Asia-Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2003).

From 1998-2000, Krauss received the prestigious Abe Fellowship from the Center for Global Partnership for research on the U.S. and Japan in APEC. In 1992 he was a "Distinguished Lecturer" for the Association for Asian Studies, and in 1994 he received a National Endowment for the Humanities award to direct a "Summer Seminar for College Teachers" on the theme of "The Democratic Experience in Japan."

Krauss has made numerous research trips to Japan since he first went there in 1968. He has also been a visiting scholar at Tokyo, Kyoto, Keio, and Sophia Universities. His current and future book projects include one on how the electoral reform of the early 1990s actually changed the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Japanese politics (with Robert Pekkanen), and another on the domestic politics of the U.S.-Japan alliance in comparative perspective (with Chris Hughes and Verena Blechinger).