Prof. Kushner received his BA from Brandeis University and then began his career as a high school teacher of social studies in Chicago. Later, he traveled to Iwate, Japan where he taught English, lived in a Buddhist temple, and attended Japanese elementary school, studying Japanese along with other students ages 6-12. On and off he lived in Japan for about 7 years - in Tokyo, Yokohama and Iwate, at times studying at Rikkyo University and Tokyo University. After completing courses in advanced Japanese, Prof. Kushner was an editor/ translator at the National Institute for Research Advancement, a think tank in Tokyo. He taught western history at Shenyang Teacher's University in the north of China where he also studied Chinese and began research in Chinese history. After returning to the United States he attended graduate school at Princeton University, did more Chinese language training in Taipei, Taiwan and then received a PhD in history.
Prof. Kushner teaches undergraduate courses relating to modern East Asian history.
Prof. Kushner is pleased to supervise graduate students interested in imperial and postwar Japanese history, 20th century Japan-Taiwan, as well as Sino-Japanese relations, the history of the Cold War in East Asia, and history of war crimes in East Asia.
Barak Kushner has written three monographs: 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; Slurp! A culinary and social history of ramen - Japan's favorite noodle soup (Brill, 2012), awarded the 2013 Sophie Coe Prize for Food History; and The Thought War - Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Hawaii 2006).
In March 2013 he launched a 6-year European Research Council funded project, “The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965.” This project examines the impact of the fall of the Japanese empire in East Asia. He also recently finished a large translation project, with 6 graduate students, of a book which examines the intersection of media, history and politics entitled Media, Propaganda and Politics in 20th-Century Japan. As a scholar he has written on wartime Japanese and Chinese propaganda, Japanese media, Sino-Japanese relations, humor, food history, BC class war crimes, and the Cold War. Currently, he is working on a monograph concerning postwar East Asian history, and a second volume about war crimes in East Asia, tentatively entitled The Construction of Justice in East Asia and the Search for Legitimacy.
Current PhD students
| Mi Kwi Cho: Post-war immigration and discrimination in Japan, focussing on zainichi Koreans. |
| Rashaad Eshack: Japanese migrant, Nikkei, diasporic identity in the Americas |
| Ko-Hang Liao: Rethinking Defeat: Japan, Chiang Kai-shek and the 'White Group' in Taiwan, 1949-1969 |
| Mina Marković: Imperial and Post-imperial Japan and population policies |
| Reyhan Silingar: Rethinking the emperor as symbol of the state: the “imperial house diplomacy” through the lenses of the Showa emperor’s overseas missions, 1952-75 |
| Sheung Chun Jonathan Yeung: Sino-Japanese interactions in the context of early 20th-century Chinese students in Japan |
