Gavan McCormack


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.

Academic career

McCormack read Law and Arts at the University of Melbourne from 1955 to 1959. From 1960–62, he spent two years completing an MA in history. McCormack spent the 1962–1963 academic year at Osaka University of Foreign Studies where he took a Diploma in Japanese Language and Culture. From 1963–66, he read Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, taking a second. McCormack then spent two years completing a second MA at SOAS in Area Studies. From 1969 to 1974, he completed a PhD at SOAS. His thesis was 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 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.

Select bibliography

Books