Toshihiro Higuchi
Title: Associate Lecturer / Postdoctoral Fellow.
Interests: Twentieth-century science, politics, and ethics of environmental
pollution, natural resources, and environmental health in the
globalizing twentieth-century world.
Email:higuchitoshihiro@gmail.com
Phone:(202) 368-6105
Office:Room 214, Bradley Memorial Building
Biography
I am an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, 2012-2014. I received my PhD from Georgetown University in 2011. Before coming to Madison, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.Trained as an international environmental historian, I am interested in the twentieth-century science, politics, and ethics of environmental pollution, natural resources, and environmental health in the globalizing twentieth-century world.
My dissertation, which I am currently revising for publication as a book, discusses the Cold War science and politics of the worldwide fallout hazards of nuclear explosions through 1963, the problem which became the first truly global pollution problems of the anthropogenic origin. Informed by sociological studies of risk and knowledge, I focus on the reflexive feedback process between national security and environmental health risks mediated by what I call the politics of risk, in which experts and laypeople constantly (re)negotiated, in the shifting Cold War conditions, how best to deal with "what we don't know" and "what we don't agree" in risk analysis.
My next book project will examine the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911 to explain the historical evolution of international wildlife conservation on the shifting matrix of interests among states, industries, labor, scientists, activists and aborigines around the Pacific Rim. The historical analysis of this first international wildlife conservation agreement is highly relevant to ur understanding of current disputes over the international protection of whales, dolphins, and many other endangered species.
Curriculum Vitae
Education
Ph.D., Georgetown University, History, 2011
M.A., State University of New York, Albany, History, 2005
M.A., University of Tsukuba (Japan), International Political Economy, 2002
Articles
Toshihiro Higuchi, "Tipping the Scale of Justice: The Fallout Suit of 1958 and the Environmental Legal Dimension of Nuclear Pacifism," Peace & Change (forthcoming).
Toshihiro Higuchi, "'An Environmental Origin of Antinuclear Activism in Japan, 1954-1963: The Politics of Risk, the Government, and the Grassroots Movement," Peace & Change 33:3 (2008), 333-366.
Toshihiro Higuchi, "'Clean' Bombs: Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Strategy in the 1950s," The Journal of Strategic Studies 29:1 (2006), 83-116.
Book Sections
"The Biological Blowback of Empire? The Collapse of the Japanese Empire and the Influx of the 'Deadly Environment,' 1945-1952 " section in Kimitaka Matsuzato, ed., Comparative Imperiology (Hokkaido University Press, 2010).
"Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Debate on Risk Knowledge in Cold War America, 1945–1963" section in J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Courses taught
HistSci 350: International Relations and the Environment in the Twentieth Century
