Name Robin Gerster Role Author | ||
 | ||
Institutions Monash UniversityUniversity of Tokyo Thesis Big-noting the promotion of an heroic theme in Australian war prose (1985) Main interests Cultural histories of war and travel Major works Big-noting (1987)Travels in Atomic Sunshine (2008) Notable awards The Age Non-Fiction Award (1988)New South Wales Premier's Australian History Prize (2009) Books Big-noting, Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan, Legless in Ginza, Seizures of youth Institution | ||
Robin Gerster (born 1953) is an Australian author and academic. He is a Professor at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His major fields of expertise are the cultural histories of war and travel, and Western representations of Japan. As a postgraduate, he won the Australian War Memorial's inaugural C.E.W. Bean Scholarship, for his research project on Australian war literature. The PhD-thesis which emerged from this research was subsequently published as Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing, which remains the landmark study in its field. In 1988, it won the The Age Book of the Year Award in the non-fiction category.
In the 1990s he held the Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo – an experience which led to the controversial travel book, Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan (1999). His book, Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan, won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Australian History in 2009.