Naoko Shimazu is a historian whose interests have strong interdisciplinary foundations. She has spent most of her life outside of Japan, having grown up in Malaysia, New Zealand, Qatar, and Canada, before ending up at the University of Oxford, where she obtained an MPhil and a DPhil in International Relations. She taught for twenty years in the Department of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, followed by seven years in Singapore at Yale-NUS College with a joint appointment as a research cluster leader at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. In August 2023, she was appointed as the inaugural professor of Tokyo College, a new institute for advanced study at the University of Tokyo established in 2019.

Shimazu has worked extensively on themes related to the intersection of modern Japan with the early twentieth-century world. Her book Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (Routledge, 1998) explores Japan’s proposal for racial equality and its rejection at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. In her second major work, Japanese Society at War: War, Death and Memory of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), she delves into the social and cultural history of modern society at war. She reconstructs the social life of the conscript soldier at the front, attitudes toward war and death, and the construction of a heroic war myth – providing a rare bottom-up history that challenges the assumed monolithic nature of modern Japanese nationalism.

Her current main project concerns cultural approaches to the study of global diplomacy. She has developed a framework – diplomacy as theatre – to capture and articulate the symbolic meaning of the Bandung Conference of 1955. Global diplomacy is recast as a ‘performance’, which illuminates aspects of diplomatic sociability as well as the importance of situating diplomacy in everyday life. Her extensive work on the use of visual sources has led to the publication of Cold War Asia: A Visual History of Global Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2025). She is also an editor (with Christian Goeschel) of the Oxford Handbook of the Cultural History of Global Diplomacy, c.1750–2000 (forthcoming). She is currently completing Diplomacy as Theatre: The 1955 Bandung Conference.

Naoko Shimazu is in residence in September 2025.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.