Robert Cribb

Biography

Robert Cribb is a historian of Asia whose work has focussed especially on 19th and 20th century Indonesia. He has written about Indonesia’s revolution against the Dutch in the 1940s, about the mass killing of communists in 1965–66 and about the legal regime of the Dutch colonial era, as well as more generally on Indonesian national identity and politics. He has also written on the cultural history of the orangutan and is the author of two historical atlases, one on Indonesia, one on Northeast Asia (Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia and eastern Siberia). His current work (with Sandra Wilson, Murdoch University) addresses Japanese war crimes during the Second World war, especially in Southeast Asia, as well as the war crimes trials which prosecuted many perpetrators. He has worked at Griffith University, the University of Queensland, the Netherlands Institute of Advance Study, the Nordic Institue of Asian Studies, the National University of Singapore and the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. For more than half his career, he was a teacher and researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra.