Rate My Professor Simon Avenell

Simon Avenell is Professor in the School of Culture, History, and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, and serves as Director of the ANU Japan Institute. He holds a PhD in History from the University of California at Berkeley, awarded on 24 May 2003. Avenell previously served as Director of the ANU Japan Institute from 2014 to 2016 and as Associate Dean (Higher Degrees by Research) in the College of Asia and the Pacific from 2016 to 2022. His academic interests encompass modern Japanese history, postwar Japan (1945-present), civic activism, civil society, social history, political history, social movements, and the history of ideas. He is currently researching the history of youth, aging, and generation in contemporary Japan. Avenell publishes in major Japan and area studies journals such as The Journal of Japanese Studies, positions: east asia cultures critique, Social Science Japan Journal, Environmental History, and Modern Asian Studies.

Avenell has authored four single-authored books: Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (University of California Press, 2010), a history of civic thought, social activism, and civil society in postwar Japan; Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), an exploration of Japanese activists' role in environmental movements worldwide from the 1960s; Asia and Postwar Japan: Deimperialization, Civic Activism, and National Identity (Harvard Asia Center, 2022), which traces Japan’s complicated reengagement with Asia after colonial empire and militarism; and A History of Postwar Japan: Recovery, Prosperity, and Transformation (University of Hawaii Press, 2025), which tells the epic story of Japan from 1945 to the present. He co-edited Handbook of Civil Society in Japan (with Akihiro Ogawa, Routledge, 2025), Reconsidering Postwar Japanese History: A Handbook (Routledge, 2023), and Transnational Civil Society in Asia: The Potential of Grassroots Regionalization (with Akihiro Ogawa, Routledge, 2021).