Kevin Hewison

Kevin Hewison is an Australian social and political scientist, formerly the Weldon E. Thornton Distinguished Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and Director of the Carolina Asia Center. He is now Weldon E. Thornton Distinguished Emeritus Professor at UNC.

Born in 1954, in Collie, Western Australia, he completed undergraduate studies at Perth's Western Australian Institute of Technology and Murdoch University. He completed his Ph.D. in 1984 at Murdoch University, supervised by Richard Robison. He has held academic posts at Murdoch University (Perth, Australia), the Australian National University, the University of Papua New Guinea, the University of New England and the City University of Hong Kong in social science and area studies disciplines.

He has also held visiting positions at several universities. In 1989-90, he was a Visiting Professor at Mahidol University (Thailand) and he has twice been a Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick (UK), in 2000 and 2010. In the first half of 2012, he was Visiting Professor of Asian Studies at the Singapore Management University and in December 2015 and February–March 2016, he was Academic Icon (Visiting Professor) with the Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya. In 2017, he spent January to July as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University.

Kevin Hewison was the Foundation Chair of Asian Studies at the University of New England (1994-2000) and was then Professor and Director of City University’s Southeast Asia Research Centre in Hong Kong (2000-2004). He joined UNC in 2005 and retired in 2013 to become the Sir Walter Murdoch Professor of Politics and International Studies and Director of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University. He retired from Murdoch at the end of 2015.

In 2014, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

He is currently Editor-in-chief of Journal of Contemporary Asia

Known primarily for his work on Thailand's political economy and on various aspects of labour and precarious work in Asia, he is the author or editor of 18 books and has written some 250 articles, chapters and media contributions.