Sheldon Garon is the Nissan Professor in Japanese Studies, Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. At the Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po he directs the five-year ERC Advanced Grant project, “The Global War on Civilians, 1905-1945”. The project researches the connected histories of the aerial bombing of cities, food blockades, and campaigns to “demoralize” enemy civilians.  At the same time, the project investigates how many belligerents constructed “home fronts” to mobilize civilians in support of total war. 

A specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese history, Prof. Garon also writes transnational or global history that spotlights the flow of ideas and practices between Europe, Asia, the United States. His global history, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves (2012), examines the histories of saving and spending over the past two centuries in Japan, other Asian nations, Europe, and America. 

Prof. Garon’s work on Japanese history similarly explores relationships between state and society. These include the books The State and Labor in Modern Japan (1987), and Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (1997).

A Ph.D. in History from Yale University, Prof. Garon has supervised more than 30 Ph.D. dissertations at Princeton.

Prof. Garon’s explorations in global history include: 

• “Operation STARVATION, 1945: A Transnational History of Blockades and the Defeat of Japan.” The International History Review (2024).
• “Applying Global History to the Study of War: Transnational Narratives of Resilience under Aerial Bombardment,” in Jeremy Adelman and Andreas Eckert, eds., Narratives, Nations, and Other World Products in the Making of Global History (Bloomsbury, 2024), 103-26.
• “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).
• “Japon: la guerre des autres?” in Bruno Cabanes, ed., Une histoire de la guerre—Du XIXe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2018), 538-51. 
• “Transnational History and Japan’s ‘Comparative Advantage,’” Journal of Japanese Studies (2017).
• “The Home Front and Food Insecurity in Wartime Japan: A Transnational Perspective,” in Hartmut Berghoff, Jan Logemann, and Felix Römer, eds., The Consumer on the Home Front: Second World War Civilian Consumption in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2017), 29-53.
• “Defending Civilians against Aerial Bombardment: A Comparative/Transnational History of Japanese, German, and British Home Fronts, 1918-1945,” jointly published in Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 14, Issue 23, No. 2 (December 1, 2016), and in Mass Violence and Resistance, Sciences Po, Special Issue on Bombing of Civilians in Asia and Around the World (December 1, 2016), French translation available, https://apjjf.org/2016/23/garon 

Prof. Garon 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.