Harish Mehta

Books

Dr. Mehta has written three books on Cambodia: Hun Sen: Strongman of Cambodia (co-author Julie Mehta) is based on several hours of interviews with Prime Minister Hun Sen, whom the authors have known personally for twenty-one years; an updated edition was published in 2013. It has been criticised by reviewers as being hagiographic and plagued by extreme partiality towards Hun Sen.

Mehta's 2001 book Warrior Prince: Norodom Ranariddh, Son of King Sihanouk of Cambodia is based on several hours of interviews with Prince Norodom Ranariddh, his wife Princess Marie Ranariddh (interviewed by Julie), his brother Prince Norodom Chakrapong, and Prince Chakrapong's son Prince Norodom Buddhapong, as well as several actors in Cambodian politics. King Sihanouk was critical of the book, and issued several press statements to correct the historical record.

As a New Left Historian, Mehta is supportive of the efforts by King Norodom Sihanouk to create a neutral and non-aligned Cambodia. Mehta praises King Sihanouk's influential role as a leading global voice for national liberation struggles in several decolonising countries in Asia in his public statements and in signed editorials in Kambuja magazine. Mehta argues that historians will remember King Sihanouk as a nationalist who attempted to keep his country free from the hegemony of both the United States and the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Hun Sen, likewise, opposes American intervention in his country.

Mehta's 1997 book Cambodia Silenced: The Press Under Six Regimes is the first effort to document the troubled history of the Cambodian press. These three books have been widely cited in historical works and dissertations by scholars.

Mehta has articles have appeared in the journal Peace and Change, and Diplomatic History in 2012. He is working on a full-length book on North Vietnam's people's diplomacy.

Awards

As a historian, Mehta has won several academic awards, among which is the Samuel Flagg Bemis Award in 2008 and 2007 given by the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations.

In 1989, he won the Journalist of the Year award from the Press Foundation of Asia, Manila and the Mitsubishi Public Affairs Committee, Japan.

Education

Born in Lucknow, he was educated at La Martiniere College (he was in Hodson House), and at the Canning College at the University of Lucknow. He was an International Freedom Forum Fellow and graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His PhD dissertation at McMaster University is on North Vietnam's diplomacy during the American war in Vietnam. He argues that the people of North Vietnam conducted remarkably successful diplomacy despite the meager economic and military strength of their country. He has conducted research in the Vietnamese archives, and speaks and writes Vietnamese (tieng Viet).

Academic career

May–June 2011 Lecturer. History 3KK3, The Vietnam War, Department of History, McMaster University. This third-year undergraduate course examines the US war in Vietnam from multiple perspectives.

Jan 2011 – Apr 2011 Instructor. History 1702H, World History, From 1800 to the Present, Trent University, Department of History, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. This half-year course surveys global history with emphasis on colonialism, wars of liberation, 20th Century wars and revolutions, modern globalisation, and emphasises gender and race.

Sept 2010 – Dec 2011 Instructor. History 1701H, World History to 1800, Trent University, Department of History, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. This half-year course surveys global history with emphasis on types of warfare, empire, hegemony, patriarchy, cross-cultural encounters, and archaic globalisation.

Sept–Dec 2010 Lecturer. History 377H1-F, 20th Century American Foreign Relations, Department of History, University of Toronto. This third-year undergraduate course surveys the history of the foreign relations of the United States from 1898 to the present with special focus on US military interventions in the War of 1898, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, with an emphasis on gender and race.

June–Aug 2009 Instructor. History 3KK3, The Vietnam War, Department of History, McMaster University.

Journalistic career

He began his journalistic career in the late-1970s as a reporter on Bombay magazine of the India Today Group. In the early-1980s, he was National Affairs Editor/Associate Editor of Gentleman magazine, a Bombay based features magazine that pursued serious investigative journalism under the helm of editor Minhaz Merchant, and ran stories and columns by the Indian poet Dom Moraes, and others. Later, Mehta worked as Associate Publisher and Managing Editor of the Bombay-based Imprint magazine when Moraes was editor.

In the late 1980s, he moved to Singapore as Indochina Correspondent for the Business Times, covering Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. He was then posted as Indochina correspondent in Bangkok. After completing his assignment with the Business Times, he wrote country reports on Thailand for The Economist Intelligence Unit. Mehta has travelled to Vietnam and Cambodia more than one hundred times since 1990.

Harish is married to Julie Mehta, a scholar of Postcolonial studies, who teaches at the University of Toronto.