Robin Gerster
Robin Gerster is an Australian author and academic. He is a Professor at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His major fields of expertise are the cultural histories of war and travel, and Western representations of Japan. As a postgraduate, he won the Australian War Memorial's inaugural C.E.W. Bean Scholarship, for his research project on Australian war literature. The PhD thesis that emerged from this research was subsequently published as Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing, which remains the landmark study in its field. In 1988, it won The Age Book of the Year Award in the non-fiction category.
In the 1990s he held the Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo – an experience which led to the controversial travel book, Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan. His book, Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan, won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Australian History in 2009, and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Non-Fiction Book Award and the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History. It was republished in a new paperback edition, with an Afterword, in 2019.Author
