Our Research Team
Sheldon GARON
Principal Investigator
Sheldon Garon is the Nissan Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. A specialist in modern Japanese history, he also writes transnational/global history.
Publications include Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves (2012); Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (1997); and The State and Labor in Modern Japan (1987). His explorations in global history include: “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); “Operation STARVATION, 1945: A Transnational History of Blockades and the Defeat of Japan,” The International History Review (2024); and “Transnational History and Japan’s ‘Comparative Advantage’,” Journal of Japanese Studies (2017).
He has supervised more than 30 Ph.D. dissertations at Princeton. A Ph.D. in History from Yale University, he 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.
Mariella TERZOLI
Postdoctoral Researcher
Mariella Terzoli earned her PhD in contemporary history in 2023 at the University of Milan in cotutelle with the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Her research was focused on the Italians who fought in Indochina within the French Foreign Legion (1946-1956), from enlistment to the end of their contracts.
She subsequently began a one-year postdoc at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” on the production and circulation of trade guns from Europe to Central Africa in the 19th Century.
Anne VAN MOURIK
Postdoctoral Researcher
Anne van Mourik defends her PhD titled Mobilizing Hunger: War and Textbooks in Germany 1914-2020 at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies and University of Amsterdam in 2025.
Anne van Mourik is interested in how societies deal with war and mass violence. She explores the significance of German war related hunger periods in German education and shows how these afterlives became crucial for German identity formation and state building.
Previously she was involved in projects on the role of the Dutch Red Cross during WWII and Dutch violence in Indonesia (1945-1950).
Anne is the creator of the NIOD-Rewind Podcast on war and violence and her recent publications include articles in The Journal of Transatlantic Studies and Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2024, 2025).
Boyd VAN DIJK
Senior Researcher
Boyd Van Dijk is an historian of the international order and is working on a new book (now under contract with OUP) recovering a global history of the ideas and practice of international law in wartime.
He was a McKenzie Fellow at the University of Melbourne and Oxford Martin Fellow at the University of Oxford.
He is also the author of the prize-winning monograph Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions (OUP), and has written articles for Past & Present, the Law and History Review, and the American Journal of International Law.
