Sherzod Muminov

Sherzod Muminov is a historian of East Asia and Associate Professor of Japanese History at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and master’s degrees from universities in the UK and Japan. Sherzod teaches courses on the history of modern Japan and the world, the Cold War, the Soviet Union, internment camps and spaces of detention, and other subjects. Using multilingual archives, Sherzod researches, in broad terms, the challenges to western hegemony posed by Japan and the USSR in the twentieth century.

Sherzod’s first book, Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan, was published by Harvard University Press in January 2022. It is the first comprehensive English-language study of the captivity of more than 600,000 Japanese former servicemen in the Soviet labor camps in the wake of the Second World War, written based on archival sources in Russian, Japanese, and English, and over 100 survivor memoirs. This research was awarded the inaugural Murayama Tsuneo Prize in Japan.

Sherzod has published articles in journals such as Cold War History, Journal of Cold War Studies, and Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context. He most recently authored a chapter on the Japanese Empire for the forthcoming Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism. With Professor Barak Kushner (University of Cambridge) he co-edited two volumes that bring to light the complex afterlives of Japanese Empire in East Asia. As an empirical, multilingual historian, Sherzod has worked in archives and repositories in Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. In 2013-2014 he was a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellow at the Boissonade Institute of Modern Law and Politics at Hosei University in Tokyo, and between 2015-2017 a postdoctoral researcher at the ERC Project “The Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965” at the University of Cambridge. Between April and July 2022, Sherzod was a visiting associate professor at the Center for Northeast Asian Studies, Tohoku University, in Sendai, Japan.

Prior to joining the UEA in 2017, Sherzod taught Japanese and East Asian history at Cambridge University. At the UEA, he offers an eclectic mix of courses. He teaches a final-year “special subject” on modern Japan and an innovative course titled Camps in History and Memory that analyzes the past century through the lens of detention camps. In addition, Sherzod co-teaches the modules Cold War: A New History, and From Stalin to Putin: The Long Shadow of the War. Besides his teaching experience in the UK, Sherzod has delivered guest lectures at Waseda University and Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan, and once upon a long time ago was a teaching assistant at the University of Tsukuba, also in Japan.