Professor Barak Kushner

Barak Kushner is Professor of East Asian History and was Co-Chair of the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge (2021-2024). He has edited four volumes and written four monographs. His most recent book is The Geography of Injustice: East Asia's Battle between Memory and History (Cornell University Press, 2014). Prior books include: Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Harvard University Press, 2015), (Winner of the American Historical Association's 2016 John K. Fairbank Prize), and in a Chinese translation. In addition, he penned Slurp! A culinary and social history of ramen - Japan's favorite noodle soup (Brill, 2012), available in a Japanese translation, traditional Chinese translation, and Chinese mainland version. Slurp! was awarded the 2013 Sophie Coe Prize for Food History, the longest-running and most generous prize for writing in food history in the English language. The Thought War - Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Hawaii 2006), is also available in a Japanese translation. In 2020, he hosted and narrated three episodes (of an eight-part series) of an award winning Chinese television documentary series on war crimes trials produced by the Shanghai Media Group. For more on the series see a long Chinese article on the Asia-Pacific War Crimes Trials documentary. 

From 2013 to 2019 Kushner managed a £1.2 million European Research Council funded project, “The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965.” This grant examined the impact of the fall of the Japanese empire in East Asia. Over six years, the project resulted in three volumes: The Dismantling of Japan's Empire in East Asia: De-imperialization, Postwar Legitimation and Imperial Afterlife, (Routledge 2017), Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding (Bloomsbury 2020), and In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire:  Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia (Hong Kong University Press 2020). You can view all the members and affiliates, as well as the output, conferences, and workshops that the project produced here. Barak also co-edited a volume about Japan's lost decades with former Asahi Newspaper editor-in-chief, Funabashi Yoichi, entitled Examining Japan's Lost Decades, also in a Japanese translation. 

For his complete bio, see his personal webpage: http://www.barakkushner.net.

Research Interests

Modern Japanese history, modern Chinese history, Sino-Japan relations, media history, propaganda, food history, war crimes in East Asia, international law, social and cultural history (DOS for the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies)