Bio

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 history that spotlights the flow of ideas and institutions.  His book Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves (2012) examines the linked histories of saving and spending over the past two centuries in Japan, Europe, other East Asian nations, and the U.S. Previous publications include The State and Labor in Modern Japan (1987); Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (1997); and The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West (co-edited).  He is currently writing a transnational history of “home fronts” in Japan, Germany, Britain, and the United States in World War II.