Artwork by Anna Matthews depicts characters from modern and pre-modern EAS popular culture riding a punt together on the river Cam, college buildings in the background

East Asian Popular Culture is a vibrant and fast-moving field. Study with us to pioneer a new academic approach and join the dots between past, present and future in the first programme of its kind.

East Asian Popular Culture is emerging as a vibrant and dynamic academic field. Become a key player in this growing area of study by joining our innovative 1-year MPhil in East Asian Popular Culture Across Time at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

This is a cutting-edge and intellectually ambitious programme that is set to welcome students starting in October 2026.

“With our broad range of expertise in media studies, literature, and visual culture, our Faculty is the ideal home for this programme. Our multi-regional and interdisciplinary approach, enriched by in-depth knowledge of the historical contexts, will enable you to study popular culture in radical, new ways.”

Laura Moretti (Professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture)

This first-of-its-kind MPhil pioneers a new academic approach to popular culture by connecting the past, present and future. With us, you will develop skills in analysing key cultural products while considering how they are shaped by transmedial flows and other processes including translation, adaptation, top-down design, and grassroots creativity.

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Beyond borders

East Asia is home to vibrant cultural exchange, with joint productions, adaptations and fandoms that traverse multiple borders. Our new MPhil investigates these connections by adopting a transnational perspective that encompasses Greater China, Korea and Japan. We highlight cultural ecosystems that a single-country approach often overlooks.

Historical depth

Popular culture is often associated with the present. With us, you learn there is also an exciting historical dimension to this field, by going back as far as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Join the dots from past centuries to present day to gain a deeper understanding of cultural change and continuity.

A breadth of media

We engage with a wealth of different media, from well-known stops – boybands, manga, and martial arts movies, for example – to the less-explored territories of graphic narratives, performing arts, religious practices, gaming in the premodern world, and much more. Media do not exist in a vacuum but reflect and shape social and political dimensions. With us, you explore how to draw meaningful connections between texts and contexts.

Shaping the field of popular culture

By extending beyond regional, historical, and media boundaries, our programme will help you rethink the study of popular culture. At the end of the programme you will have developed sophisticated skills that unlock the depth and breadth of this growing field of study in innovative ways. You will think about popular culture as you have never done before!.

Why our MPhil?

We are ranked as the best UK university for Arts and Humanities and second best in the world in this field (THE Subject Rankings 2025).

We received full scores on academic reputation, faculty student ratio, employer reputation, employment outcomes and international faculty reputation in the QS World University Rankings 2025.

We are ranked number 1 out of 130 universities by the Complete University Guides’ University League Tables. East Asian studies ranked in the top 10 of subjects.

You study under the guidance of leading scholars in the field.

You develop your independent and original research under close supervision in bespoke one-to-one sessions with your supervisor, alongside a rich taught component.

What will you study?

For the taught component of this programme, you will engage with three courses (called “papers” at Cambridge), led by a team of leading scholars:

Theoretical Approaches to Popular Culture
Popular Culture in Premodern East Asia
Popular Culture in Contemporary East Asia

These papers are taught by leading scholars in the field and are designed as interactive classes, normally seminars. Lectures might be provided for certain topics to give solid foundations in lesser-known topics. We occasionally organise sessions with invited speakers. For each paper, you will write an original 5,000-word research essay on a topic of your choice but in line with the remit of the course. An alternative exercise might be allowed by the Faculty.

Alongside the taught papers, you will further refine your research skills by writing a 15,000-word dissertation. This is where you explore your passion for a specific topic and write a piece of research that makes a substantial and fresh contribution to the field. You are not alone in this endeavour: you will work closely with your supervisor in bespoke one-to-one supervisions.

Along your intellectual journey with us, you are guided through the various steps of academic research, writing, presentation and career development.

Language prerequisites

You will engage with primary sources in English translation and with English-language scholarship. Knowledge of Japanese, Chinese, and/or Korean (modern and/or premodern) is desirable but by no means required. Lectures might present materials that have yet to be translated or discussed in English-language scholarship.

Other requirements

Please read about other requirements and to apply, please click the button below.

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Artwork by Anna Matthews

Anna Matthews graduated from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in 2025 with Japanese Studies, writing a dissertation about what could be considered a nascent form of Japanese popular culture, a collection of folk songs called the Ryūtatsu bushi. She tried to capture an eclectic mix of different kinds of East Asian popular culture, both new and old in this image. Anna has enjoyed drawing from a young age, but throughout her time at university she neglected her old hobby. So given this opportunity upon graduation, she was happy to try some new techniques (digital art) and reacquaint herself with her old passion, albeit in an unfamiliar form.

Faculty Members with Research Interests in East Asian Popular Culture Over Time

Dr Noga Ganany

University Associate Professor in the Study of Late Imperial China

I welcome proposals for graduate work in the areas of late-imperial Chinese literature, print culture, and Chinese religions.

Research interests: Chinese history, premodern Chinese literature, religious practice in China, print culture and history of the book, travel and pilgrimage, and popular culture. I am particularly interested in the interplay between literature and religion in late-imperial China (primarily during the Ming and Qing dynasties). I am also interested in the history of the book, travel and pilgrimage, popular culture, and religious practice.

Dr Heather Inwood

University Associate Professor in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

Dr Inwood is happy to supervise students in topics relating to her research on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, culture and media.

Research interests: Chinese contemporary genre fiction and poetry; popular, fan and folk cultures; internet culture and society; media studies; sociology of literature and culture

Dr Nuri Kim

University Assistant Professor in Korean Studies

Research interests: History of modern Korea. The history of knowledge, especially the history of academia and alternative knowledge regimes. Historiography and historical memory. New religious movements.

Professor Laura Moretti

Professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture, Head of Department and Co-Chair of the Faculty

Prof Moretti welcomes graduate students interested in Japanese premodern and early modern literature. She also strongly encourages projects that investigate early modern Japanese culture more broadly, including visual culture and woodblock prints; book history and/or textual scholarship in Japan; Japanese palaeography and calligraphy, and art.. She is also keen to supervise projects that work on issues of adaptation, canon-making, intervisuality, playfulness, humour, satire, metafiction, didactic prose, medicine in popular culture, and transmedia storytelling.

Research interests: Prof Laura Moretti's research focusses on early modern Japanese popular literature and culture. Prof Moretti's projects are inherently interdisiplinary, placed at the intersection of literature, art history, book history, textual scholarship, and palaeography. Working with both books and visual media, including woodblock prints and board games, and combining rigorous close reading of a wide range of archival materials with bold intellectual arguments, Prof Moretti's research challenges our understanding of literature and wishes to retrieve textual traditions that have been silenced after the encounter of Japanese literature with "modernity". Prof Moretti's research covers a wide span of time, moving from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century.

Dr Victoria Young

Kawashima University Associate Professor in Japanese Literature and Culture

Dr Young is pleased to supervise graduate students interested in modern and contemporary Japanese and Okinawan literature, particularly where linked to themes and issues of imperialism, decolonisation, gender and sexuality, multilinguality, and translation.

Research interests: Modern and contemporary Japanese literature; Okinawan studies; writing by minorities in Japan; postcolonial studies; feminist criticism; translation theory.