Toshihiro Higuchi

Toshihiro Higuchi is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. He is currently on leave while being a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars during AY2024-25. He studies the international history of the nuclear age with a focus on its scientific, technological, and environmental aspects. He also writes about the environmental history of modern Japan in the Pacific world.

A native Japanese, Higuchi received his PhD at Georgetown University in 2011. Before he returned to Georgetown in 2016 to teach the history of U.S. foreign relations, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University (2011-12); an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2012-14); and a Hakubi Project assistant professor at Kyoto University (2014-15).

Higuchi is the author of Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020). The book won the 2021 Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His academic works have appeared in The American Historical Review, Diplomatic History, Peace & Change, Journal of Strategic Studies, Historia Scientiarum, and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific. He is a contributor to many joint research projects and edited volumes. His opinion pieces have also appeared in a number of news outlets, including the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Asahi Shimbun.

Higuchi is field chair of Regional and Comparative Studies (RCST) in the School of Foreign Service (SFS), Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the 2024 SFS Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is also a member of several professional societies, including the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Society for the History of Technology, American Society for Environmental History, Peace History Society, and Japan Association of International Relations. Higuchi is an official historian for the International Commission on Radiological Protection. Currently he serves as the editor-in-chief of Kagakusi kenkyu and secretary of Peace History Society.