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About Ran Zwigenberg
I am an associate 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. I published two books that corresponded to these areas and have a third with the press now (on psychiatry and the A-bomb)My first book, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2014), won the 2016 Association for Asian Studies’ John W. Hall book award. Hiroshima deals comparatively with the commemoration and the reaction to the Holocaust and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. My second, co authored book, with Oleg Benesch (York) was on the modern history of Japanese castles (I was on NBN for that one). For more information on this and other projects, please see https://sites.psu.edu/zwigenbe...
NBN Episodes hosted by Ran:
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…
April 13, 2022
Nuclear Bodies
Robert Jacob’s book Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (Yale UP, 2022) re‑envisions the history of the Cold War as a slow nuclear war, fought on rem…
November 16, 2021
American Survivors
The little-known history of U.S. survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings reveals captivating trans-Pacific memories of war, illness, g…