Associate Professor Robert Angel
Ph.D., Columbia University, (1985)
B.A. , Magna Cum Laude, Columbia University, (1971)
Email: Angel@gwm.sc.edu Phone: 803-777-7346

Robert C. Angel is author of Explaining Economic Policy Failure: Japan and the 1969-1971 International Monetary Crisis. He has been involved academically and professionally with Japan and U.S.-Japan relations for twenty-five years, at present as an associate professor in the Department of Government and International Studies at the University of South Carolina where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Japan's domestic politics and international relations, comparative politics, and political economy.  He is completing research on one book-length study of the postwar evolution of Japan's top-level national political leadership and another on the activities of the Japan Lobby in the United States. 

Angel received his Political Science/Oriental Studies bachelor of arts degree magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Columbia University in 1971, and entered Columbia's doctoral program in political science and East Asian Institute the same year.  Seven years of full-time graduate study at Columbia included a year of intensive Japanese language training at the Inter-University Center in Tokyo, and a year of dissertation research in Tokyo funded by Fulbright and Social Science Research Council Fellowships.  He received the Ph.D. from Columbia in 1985 after a final year of residence during 1984-85. 

Angel was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Japan Economic Institute in Washington, D.C. from 1978 to 1984, a research and publications organization funded by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs that employs American specialists recruited for their academic and linguistic Japan expertise, and maintains one of the most comprehensive research libraries on economic and political Japan in the United States. Angel resigned the JEI presidency in mid-1984 to return to full-time research and university teaching, joining the University of South Carolina's Department of Government and International Studies as an entry-level assistant professor in the fall of 1986.