2025 Admiral Nimitz Annual Conference

Introductory Speaker & Moderator

Richard B. Frank is an internationally recognized leading authority on the Asia-Pacific War. He published his first book Guadalcanal in 1990. His second work, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, appeared in 1999 and has been called one of the six best books in English about World War II. Both Random House books won awards and became main selections of the History Book Club. In 2007, he completed MacArthur as part of the Palgrave Great Generals series. Besides his numerous appearances on television and radio, he was a consultant for the epic HBO miniseries, “The Pacific.” He serves on the Board of Presidential Councilors of the National World War II Museum, including a term as head of that body. The first volume of his trilogy on the Asia Pacific War 1937-1945, Tower of Skulls, published in March 2020, was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History 2021.

The Project Y Spies

Alan B. Carr currently serves as a Program Manager and the Senior Historian for Los Alamos National Laboratory. During his tenure as a Laboratory historian, which began in 2003, Alan has produced several publications and lectures pertaining to the Manhattan Project, nuclear testing history, and the historical evolution of LANL. He has lectured for numerous professional organizations and has been featured as a guest on many local, national, and international radio and television programs. Before coming to Los Alamos, Carr completed his graduate studies at Texas Tech University.

Shock and Awe in Japan: Trauma between Science and Politics

Franziska Seraphim teaches modern Japanese and global history at Boston College, where she also directs the Asian Studies Program. Among other courses, she teaches the Asia Pacific War as transnational history, Hiroshima in history and memory, as well as memory of World War II globally and comparatively. She is the author of War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005 (Harvard Asia Center, 2006), and is finishing a monograph entitled “Geographies of Justice: Japanese and German War Criminals in the Postwar World, 1940s-60s.” Her research has received funding from the SSRC, ACLS, NEH, the National Humanities Center, and other prestigious institutions. Born and raised in Germany, she holds a PhD in History from Columbia University.

The Girls of Atomic City: Life in a Secret City of the Manhattan Project

Denise Kiernan is an author, journalist, producer, and host of “CRAFT: Authors in Conversation.” Her new young reader’s book, We Gather Together: Stories of Thanksgiving from then to now, arrived September 2023, and is a companion title to the popular adult nonfiction book, We Gather Together, and children’s picture book, Giving Thanks. Her book The Last Castle was an instant New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback and was also a Wall Street Journal bestseller. She is also the author of The Girls of Atomic City, which is a New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and NPR bestseller and has been published in multiple languages. She lives in North Carolina.

Atomic Doctors: The Unique Role of the Manhattan Project Physicians

James L. Nolan, Jr. is the Washington Gladden 1859 Professor of Sociology at Williams College. His teaching and research interests fall in the general areas of law and society, culture, technology and social change, and historical comparative sociology. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Harvard University Press, 2020) and What They Saw in America: Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G.K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He is currently working on a book about Nagasaki. He is the recipient of several grants and awards including a Fulbright scholarship and two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He has held visiting fellowships at Oxford University, Loughborough University, the University of Notre Dame, CUA, and Nagasaki Junshin University.