Toshihiro Higuchi

Toshihiro Higuchi is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. 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 graduated from the University of Tsukuba and went on to complete a MA there. Thereafter, he moved to the United States and earned another MA at State University of New York - Albany in 2005 and a PhD at Georgetown University in 2011. Before he returned to Georgetown to teach 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 (SHAFR). His academic works have appeared in 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 a recipient of the following scholarly awards: the 2009 Charles DeBenedetti Prize of the Peace History Society (for the article, “An Environmental Origin of Antinuclear Activism in Japan, 1954-1963”); the 2012 Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize in International History; Georgetown University's 2013 Harold N. Glassman Dissertation Award in the Humanities; and the AY2016 Best Article Prize, The History of Science Society of Japan (for the article, 「『知の交渉』と放射線防護体制の多元性」).

Higuchi is field chair of Regional and Comparative Studies (RCST) in the School of Foreign Service (SFS), Georgetown University. He is also a member of several professional societies, including the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the 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.