Professor Barak Kushner, Professor of East Asian history at the University of Cambridge and Professorial Fellow at Corpus Christi College, has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. Barak is one of 92 new Fellows from universities around the world to be elected to the British Academy’s Fellowship. 

The British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Election to its Fellowship is a prestigious honour that recognises outstanding scholarly achievement.

Barak was educated at Brandeis University and Princeton University in the United States. He began his career as a high school teacher of social studies in Chicago. Later, he travelled to Iwate, Japan where he taught English, lived in a Buddhist temple, and attended Japanese elementary school. His scholarship crosses geographical and disciplinary boundaries to examine war, empire, propaganda, and historical memory in modern East Asia. He also has a deep interest in how food history impacts political relations. 

From 2013-19 he managed a European Research Council project entitled The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Post-war East Asia. That research produced the American Historical Association’s 2016 John K. Fairbank Prize-winning book, Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice. He received the 15th Nakasone Yasuhiro Award for Excellence and was a visiting fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (2019-20).

Barak hosted and narrated several Chinese television documentaries on war crimes and postwar justice. In 2024, he starred in a Japanese TV documentary concerning the history of ramen and its global impact. His latest book is The Geography of Injustice: East Asia's Battle between Memory and History (Cornell University Press, 2024). You can read more about his work on his website.

Many congratulations to Barak.