Carol Gluck

George Sansom Professor of History

Modern Japanese history, from the nineteenth century to the present, international relations, history writing and public memory in Asia and the West

Recent courses include "World War II in History and Memory," “Telling the Twentieth Century,” "Introduction to Historical Interpretations and Methods," and “Ideas and Society in Modern Japan, 1600-present.”

Her publications include Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, 1985), Showa: the Japan of Hirohito (Norton, 1992), Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching, co-edited with Ainslie Embree (Sharpe, 1997), Thinking with the Past: Japan and Modern History (University of California, 2008), Past Obsessions: World War Two in History and Memory (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), and a number of books in Japanese, most recently Rekishi de kangaeru [Thinking with History] (Iwanami, 2007). Her most recent article is "Operations of Memory: The 'Comfort Women' and the World," in Jager and Mitter, Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Harvard University Press, 2007). Her media publications include a column in Japanese for Newsweek Japan from 2000 to 2006 and other occasional pieces in the US and Japan.

In 2006 she received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, from the government of Japan and in 2002 was honored with the Japan-United States Fulbright Program 50th Anniversary Distinguished Scholar Award. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Current activities include the National Coalition on Asian and International Studies in the Schools, the board of trustees of Asia Society, the board of directors of the Japan Society, elected member of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and others.

From 2002-2007 she directed the Expanding East Asian Studies (ExEAS) program (see below), a project funded by a $2 million grant from the Freeman Foundation. She chairs the WEAI publications program, working with Madge Huntington and others, to produce three series ( Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Weatherhead Books on Asia, and Asia Perspectives).

She is a member of the university's Committee on Global Thought established by President Bollinger in 2005, and she headed the Undergraduate Initiative of the Committee, which produced its first report and proposals in April 2007.

She received her B.A. from Wellesley in 1962 and her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1977. She joined the Columbia faculty in 1975.

Email: cg9@columbia.edu