Professor Robin Gerster
PhD (Monash University), MA (Monash University), BA, Hons,(Monash University)
Robin Gerster curriculum vitae [
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Biography
I was born in Melbourne and schooled in Melbourne and Sydney. I completed my undergraduate degree at Monash in the mid 1970s and returned to the university in the early 1980s to pursue postgraduate work. In 1982 I was awarded the inaugural C.W. Bean Postgraduate Scholarship from the Australian War Memorial in Canberra to undertake doctoral research on Australian war writing. Revised as the monograph ‘Big-noting’, my dissertation was judged Age ‘Book of the Year’ in 1988. Over the past twenty years or so I have taught and researched at Monash, punctuated by a two-year stint in Japan at the University of Tokyo from 1996, where I was Chair in Australian Studies.
My teaching and research has formed a creative symbiosis, pursuing in particular the related fields of war and representation, travel and representation, and Australian cultural relationships with the Asia-Pacific – areas in which I have published prolifically. My recent work, Travels in Atomic Sunshine: The Australian Occupation of Japan (2008) was awarded the Australian History Prize at the New South Wales Premier’s Awards in 2009. My current research project – supported by the Australian Research Council – is on Australian atomic culture.
Research interests
Atomic culture (Australian and international)
Responses to the fact and imagined possibility of nuclear destruction – in literature (eg. fiction, personal narrative, polemic), visual culture (eg. feature and documentary film), theatre and performance, and material culture (eg. museum presentations).
Travel and representation (Australian/international)
Travel, tourism and cultural expression: travel writing and journalism, the discourses of the travel industry (including guidebooks); the politics and practices of travel; travel and colonialism; the cultural history of travel.
War and representation (Australian/international)
War and (post)modernity; catastrophe and the imagination; representing violence in literature and film; war and national identities; war and gender; military occupation and culture.
Australia and the Asia-Pacific
Cultural and political histories of Australian interactions with Asia (especially Japan); Australian fiction, poetry and travel writing set in Asia
Selected publications
- Gerster, R. (2008) Travels in atomic sunshine : Australia and the occupation of Japan Carlton North, Scribe Publications.
- Gerster, R. (1999) Legless in Ginza : orientating Japan Carlton, Melbourne University Press.
- Gerster, R. (1995) Hotel Asia Ringwood, Penguin Books
- Bassett, J. and Gerster, R. (1991) Seizures of youth : ‘The Sixties’ and Australia South Yarra, Hyland House
- Gerster, Robin, (1992) Big-noting : the heroic theme in Australian war writing Carlton, Melbourne University Press.
Competitive grants
- Hiroshima and Here: A Cultural History of Australian Responses to Nuclear War and Weaponry (2010-2012), Australian research Council.
- Six Inch Rule: A Cultural Study The Australian Occupation of Japan, 1946-1952 (2005-2007), Australian Research Council.