Akita Shigeru is Designated Professor of Institute of Laser Engineering, and Emeritus Professor of Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University. He was born in Hiroshima Prefecture in 1958, graduated from Hiroshima University (BA in History in 1981; MA in History in 1983), and received a PhD in History in 2003 from Osaka University. Akita was president of the Asian Association of World Historians (AAWH) (2015-2022), and president of the East Asian Association of British History (EAABH) (2018-2024). He is the fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK) and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History and Journal of Global History. In June 2004, he was awarded the Twentieth Ohira Memorial Prize by the Ohira Memorial Foundation, and in July 2013 received the Fourteenth Yomiuri-Yoshino Sakuzo Prize from the Yomiuri Newspaper and Chuo-Koron Shinsha. In 2022 he received the Japanese government’s Medal with Purple Ribbon.
He has been working on several projects on “Creating Global History from Asian Perspectives” through global economic history. His major publications include (Ed.) American Empire in Global History (Routledge, 2022), From Empires to Development Aid (Nagoya U.P., 2017, in Japanese), and (Ed.) Oil Crises of the 1970s and the Transformation of International Order: Economy, Development and Aid in Asia and Africa (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).