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About Ran Zwigenberg
I am a professor at Pennsylvania State University. My research focuses on modern Japanese and European history, with a specialization in memory and heritage history. I taught and lectured in the United States, Europe, Israel, and Japan, and published on issues of war memory, atomic energy, psychiatry, and survivor politics. My two main areas of interest are nuclear history (mainly Hiroshima) and modern use of medievalism, especially in military heritage and modern nationalism. I published a number of books that corresponded to these areas, and am working now on a project, the military history of Hiroshima, that brings these two together (I also published a book on Japanese punk and working on a number of other topics from atomic energy to human remains from the Holocaust) For more information on this and other projects, please see https://sites.psu.edu/zwigenbe...
NBN Episodes hosted by Ran:
December 26, 2025
Fuji
Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (Princeton UP, 2025) is A panoramic biography of Japan's iconic mountain from the Ice Age to the present Mount Fuji is…
December 23, 2025
A History of Postwar Japan
This sweeping history tells the story of contemporary Japan from its defeat in the Asia-Pacific War in 1945 until the early decades of the new millenn…
November 5, 2025
When the Bones Speak
Haunted by the past, ordinary Okinawans struggle to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism. They are…
August 28, 2025
Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature
Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature: Inciting Difference (Routledge, 2024) examines contemporary debates on such concepts …
June 10, 2025
Japan at War, 1914-1952
Japan at War, 1914-1952 is a synthetic and interpretive history that highlights the centrality of war to the modern Japanese experience. The author a…
June 8, 2025
West Germany
Julia Sneeringer's book provides a concise overview of developments in the Federal Republic of Germany from the end of the Second World War and German…
April 18, 2025
Mothers Against War
Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Peace Activism in Cold War Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2025) examines the shifting relationships among motherh…
April 4, 2025
Exhibitionist Japan
From the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan has been a particularly enthusiastic user of exhibitions. Large-scale international exhibitions,…
November 11, 2024
Empire of Rags and Bones
Paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rubber, hair, fat, rags, and bones--the Nazi empire demanded its population obsessively collect anything…
September 11, 2024
After the Flying Saucers Came
Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983. Explore how sight…
June 22, 2024
Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan
In early modern Japan, upper status groups coveted pills and powders made of exotic foreign ingredients such as mummy and rhinoceros horn. By the earl…
May 19, 2024
Mooring the Global Archive
In Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories (Cambridge UP, 2023), Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship …
January 22, 2024
Kondo the Barbarian
Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan's Bloodiest Uprising (Eastbridge Books, 2023) is a gripping and revealing account of …
September 24, 2023
Inglorious, Illegal Bastards
In Inglorious, Illegal Bastards: Japan's Self-Defense Force During the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2022), Aaron Herald Skabelund examines how the Self-Defen…
September 18, 2023
Age of Emergency
When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period…
September 5, 2023
Gas Mask Nation
Airplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with p…
August 9, 2023
The Meiji Restoration
In world history, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 ranks as a revolutionary watershed, on a par with the American and French Revolutions. In this volume,…
July 7, 2023
Tsushima
Today I talked to Rotem Kowner about Tsushima (Oxford UP, 2022), which is part of the great battle series in Oxford University press. The Battle of Ts…
March 8, 2023
Madness in the Family
To fend off American and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, Japan strove to strengthen itself by drawing on the most updated ideas and pr…
October 26, 2022
Un-Thinking Collaboration: American Nisei in Transwar Japan
Today I will be talking to Carly Buxton about her book Unthinking collaboration: American Nisei in transwar Japan, which came out this year [2022] wit…
October 21, 2022
Kyoto Revisited
Kyoto Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Contemporary Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2022) looks at the uses and effects of heritage in tourism in Kyoto today see…
September 23, 2022
Yuming's The 14th Moon
Today I will be talking to Lasse Lehtonen about his book The 14th Moon, which came out with Bloomsbury this year (2022). With me today is Dr. Brooke M…
August 5, 2022
Middlemen of Modernity
Christopher Craig’s Middlemen of Modernity: Local Elites and Agricultural Development in Meiji Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2021) is a thoroughly research a…
July 28, 2022
Culture from the Slums
Jeff Hayton's book Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock in East and West Germany (Oxford UP, 2022) is a cultural history of punk in Germany. The manuscri…