Carol Gluck is the George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University. She holds the B.A degree from Wellesley College, the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, and also studied at the Universities of Munich and Tokyo. She was Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University (1991), at the Institute of Social Science, Tokyo University (1993), and l'École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales (1995, 1998); also, Visiting Research Associate at the Faculty of Law, Tokyo University in 1978-9, 1985-6, 1992; Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1999-2000, and Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, 2005-06.
Her special field is the history of modern Japan from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with writings in modern social and cultural history, international relations, World War II, history-writing and public memory in Japan and the West.
Honors and awards include the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, awarded by the Government of Japan in April, 2006; election to the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Fulbright 50th Anniversary Distinguished Scholar Award, the John King Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association, the Lionel Trilling Award of Columbia University (both for "Japan's Modern Myths"); the Mark van Doren Award and Great Teacher Award for teaching, Columbia University; the Alumnae Achievement Award, Wellesley College; Distinguished Lectureships of the Association for Asian Studies and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She will be the Distinguished Visitor in the Program in U.S.-Japan Relations, Harvard University, March 2009.
She was president of the Association for Asian Studies, 1996-97, and a member of the Board, 1995-99. She served a seven-year term as a presidential appointee to the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, 1995-2002. She is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Japan Society, Board of Trustees of the Asia Society, the Board of Directors of the Weatherhead Foundation, elected Councillor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the Council on Foreign Relations; member of the National Coalition on Asia and International Studies in the Schools. She is the recipient of Ford Foundation, Fulbright, Japan Foundation, and other grants.
Her books include Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, 1985); Showa: The Japan of Hirohito, Gluck and Graubard, W.W. Norton, 1992), Asia in Western and World History, Embree and Gluck (M.E. Sharpe, 1997), Toward Autonomy in US-Japan Relations [in Japanese], with Wada Haruki and Kang Sangjung (Fujiwara shoten, 2003); Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 2, de Bary, Gluck and Tiedemann (Columbia, 2005); Rekishi de kangaeru [Thinking about History], a volume of her scholarly essays in Japanese (Iwanami, 2007); Thinking with the Past: Japan and Modern History (University of California Press, 2009); Words in Motion, ed., Gluck and Tsing (Duke University Press, 2009); Past Obsessions: World War Two in History and Memory (Columbia University Press, in press).
Recent articles include "Meiji and Modernity: From History to Theory," in Italia e Giappone: Intrecci Culturali, ed. Rosa Caroli (Venice, 2009); "Top Ten Things to Know About Japan in the Early Twenty-first Century," Education About Asia (Winter, 2008); "Operations of Memory: 'Comfort Women' and the World," in Jager and Mitter, eds., Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Harvard University Press, 2007); "Thinking with the Past: History-writing in Modern Japan," in Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 2, rev. ed. (Columbia, 2005); "Japan and the United States in Re-imperial Times, in Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds. (New Press, 2005); "The End of the Postwar: Japan at the Turn of the Millennium," in Jeffrey Olick, ed., States of Memory (Duke, 2003).
She writes in the Japanese press, for years as a regular columnist for Newsweek Japan, lectures in the United States and abroad, and is active in efforts to improve the teaching of Asia and history in the schools.
