Quick Facts
LibraBiography
Gavan McCormack is a researcher specializing in East Asia who is Emeritus Professor and Visiting Fellow, Division of Pacific and Asian History of the Australian National University. He is also a coordinator of an award-winning open access journal The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.
Academic career
McCormack did a combined Law and Arts degree at the University of Melbourne from 1955 to 1959. He then spent two years completing a master's degree in history from 1960 to 1962. McCormack spent the 1962–1963 academic year at the Osaka Foreign Language University where he took a Diploma in Japanese Language and Culture. He then enrolled at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London where from 1963 to 1966 he did another undergraduate degree in Chinese, graduating with a Second Class Honours degree. McCormack then spent two years completing a second master's degree at SOAS in Area Studies (Far East). From 1969 to 1974 he completed a doctoral degree at SOAS and produced a thesis Chang Tso-lin, the Mukden Military Clique, and Japan, 1920–1928: The Development and interrelationships of Chinese warlordism and Japanese imperialism in northeast China. This was later published as a book.
His academic career took him to the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, then to La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia and eventually the University of Adelaide in South Australia. In 1990 he was appointed Professor in Japanese at the Australian National University.
McCormack's main research interest is in "modern Japanese (and East Asian) political, intellectual, and environmental history". He has published widely, in academic and popular journals, on the "liberation" struggles in South East Asia. In more recent times he has become more interested in environmental issues and in 1996 published The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence which attacked Japanese economic success as a mirage based on environmental exploitation that posed the single greatest threat to stability in the region. He remains a trenchant critic of the Bush Presidency and the American government in general. He has claimed that the North Korean nuclear program is justified by belligerent American rhetoric.
He worked as visiting professor at Kobe University, Kyoto University, Ritsumeikan University, Tsukuba University, International Christian University, and Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Editorial career
Gavan McCormack had contributed as a guest editorial staff of the South Korean newspaper, Kyunghyang Shinmun from December 2007 to December 2009.