Sheldon Garon is the Nissan Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. A specialist in modern Japanese history, he also writes transnational/global history.

Publications include Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves (2012); Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (1997); and The State and Labor in Modern Japan (1987). His explorations in global history include: “On the Transnational Destruction of Cities: What Japan and the United States Learned from the Bombing of Britain and Germany in the Second World War,” Past & Present (2020); “Operation STARVATION, 1945: A Transnational History of Blockades and the Defeat of Japan,” The International History Review (2024); and “Transnational History and Japan’s ‘Comparative Advantage’,” Journal of Japanese Studies (2017).

He has supervised more than 30 Ph.D. dissertations at Princeton. A Ph.D. in History from Yale University, he has received numerous awards and fellowships, including Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun: Golden Rays, the Humboldt Research Award, and the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.