Research in East Asian Studies
Our researchers work on the East Asian region, covering a wide range of topics in the fields of history, literature, society, religions, thought, politics, international relations, and linguistics.
Our projects focus on China, Japan and Korea as well as on the East Asian region as a whole, with some interest extended to the Southeast Asian region.
Popular fiction, poetry, digital media, folk and fan cultures, transmedia storytelling, genre, game studies.
Key publications include:
Verse Going Viral: China's New Media Scenes, University of Washington Press, 2014.
Chinese history
Our historians work across early, middle-period, late imperial, modern and contemporary China. Our wide-ranging research expertise and interests include cultural history, economic history, environmental history, the history of the book and print culture, the history of religion, the history of science and technology, the history of agriculture, food and dietary culture, natural history, animal studies, and materiality and infrastructure.
Key publications include:
Chinese language and linguistics
Adult and child L2 language acquisition; language development in monolingual and bilingual children; attrition; bilingualism; language processing; language teaching; lexicon; sentence structures; dependency; classical and literary Chinese.
Key publications include:
Practical Chinese Usage: Common Words and Phrases, Routledge, 2020.
Interlanguage Grammars of Mandarin Chinese, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
Chinese literature
Modern and pre-modern Chinese literature; late imperial fiction narratives; publishing and book culture; contemporary poetry in the Sinosphere; internet literature; religious literature and hagiographic writing; travel writing.
Chinese thought
Chinese philosophy through the received canon and new manuscript sources with emphasis on the classical period; political thought, the revival and re-invention of tradition in modern China.
Key publications include:
Chinese Thought: From Confucius to Cook Ding, Pelican, 2019; Penguin.
Food, sacrifice and Sagehood in Early China, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Chinese social anthropology
How Chinese people live and understand their lives in the contemporary era (always with historical practices as frames of reference); the organisation of socio-political life in different Chinese societies (mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, overseas communities); rural and urban lives; migration; the Chinese diaspora; gender and sexuality; health and the body; food; religion and ritual life; ethnic minorities; languages and dialects; popular culture; media and the internet; political culture; youth; space and place.
Chinese politics and international relations
Chinese domestic politics, largely with a focus on state-society relations, institutions, and political economy, especially with reference to labour, law and society, contentious politics, and the politics of land. Chinese international relations with a focus on the analysis of the domestic politics of foreign policy and international interactions in both China and key interlocutor countries, including the UK, US, Indonesia, and other Southeast Asian states.
Key publications include:
The Chinese Worker after Socialism, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Chinese religions
Ritual and religious practice in pre-modern and modern China; Daoism; Buddhism; sacrificial culture; the variety of ways of ‘doing religion’; Chinese religion and print culture; religious material culture; deity cults; pilgrimage and temple festivals; transnational networks; elite and popular practices; hagiography.
Key publications include:
Religion in China: Ties That Bind, Polity, 2019.
Knotting the Banner: Ritual and Relationship in Daoist Practice, University of Hawai’i Press, 2014.
Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China, Stanford University Press, 2005.
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Japanese Studies
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Japanese history
Cambridge is one of the few institutions in the world that focuses on premodern as well as modern Japanese History, covering religious, ideological, social and political changes over the long term.
We cover proto-historic times of emerging regional states in the fifth and sixth centuries, the creation of the ancient imperial state, medieval society when the warrior class gradually rose to power, the early modern age, which paved the way for Japan’s extraordinary modernisation in the late nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. This wide span of the past is connected by our common interests in historical narratives as well as theoretical and methodological approaches to research in Japanese history.
From reconstructions of the warrior class to memories of the Asia-Pacific War, these narratives play an integral part in the present day, and are therefore vital to both an academic and general understanding of Japan.
The research environment of Japanese history at Cambridge is world-class with numerous talks by senior and more junior scholars taking place in our East Asia Seminar series, a robust number of graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scholars, a range of workshops taking place throughout the year, and frequent media appearances. These activities are supported by one of the best research libraries in the world for Japanese history with a collection that continues to grow.
Among the many treasures and unique sources available, we are especially proud to be the only university library in Europe that has a collection of original Japanese medieval sources.
Key publications include:
Examining Japan’s Lost Decades, Routledge, 2015; paperback 2017.
Lovable Losers; The Heike in Action and Memory, University of Hawai’i Press, 2015.
Slurp! A culinary and social history of ramen - Japan's favorite noodle soup, Brill, 2012.
Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007.
The Thought War - Japanese Imperial Propaganda, University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.
Japanese literature
At Cambridge we pride ourselves in delivering world-leading research in Japanese literature, which covers an impressive historical scope, from early modern times to the present.
Our scholarship is rooted in critical analysis and close reading of a wealth of primary sources written in the original languages, from well-known works to materials that have been marginalised within literary history. We strive to challenge the accepted Japanese literary canon and its formation, and promote the relevance and significance of Japanese texts for addressing and reconfiguring broader questions within literary theory at large.
Research on early modern Japanese literature, led by Professor Laura Moretti, strives to retrieve textual traditions that have been silenced after the encounter of Japanese literature with "modernity". With a focus on commercially printed texts that span from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and working at the intersection of book history, visual culture, and material culture, our research pushes the boundaries of the “literary” and asks compelling questions about the act of reading.
Our approach to modern Japanese literature pays keen attention to how that literary history has been shaped by the vicissitudes of Japan’s modern history, and promotes dialogue between texts and critical theories, including translation.
As one of the leading experts in Okinawan Studies, and with expertise in other writing from Japan’s “margins”, Dr Vicky Young’s work in this field responds to calls to deconstruct, decentre, and decolonise the field of Japanese literary studies from within.
Key publications include:
Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature, Routledge, 2024.
Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi, Brill, 2024.
Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan, Columbia University Press, 2021.
Recasting the Past: An Early Modern Tales of Ise for Children, Brill, 2016.
Japanese palaeography
Our Faculty is a key player, worldwide, in the field of Japanese early modern palaeography thanks to its Mitsubishi Corporation Summer School in Early Modern Japanese Palaeography, led by Prof Laura Moretti. Conceived as a contribution to the field of Japanese studies globally, our summer school trains the new generations of scholars in decoding, transcribing, and translating early modern manuscripts and woodblock-printed texts.
Started in 2014 and now (2026) in its thirteenth edition, our summer school attracts postgraduate and undergraduate students from across the globe, including Ivy-league universities alongside European, Chinese, and Japanese universities. With us the participants acquire and hone the complex set of skills required to successfully work with early modern Japanese texts, while experimenting with cutting edge technology that involves AI.
We are proud to have trained more than 400 young researchers to date. We are delighted to see tangible research outputs emerging from the scholarly collaborations fostered by the summer school and we are thrilled that the summer school leads to a high number of postgraduate applications to our programmes.
Japanese society
Under the direction of Dr Brigitte Steger, research on Japanese society puts emphasis on the cultural history and anthropology of daily life.
We are proud to lead an international research project titled ‘Timing day and night: timescapes in premodern Japan’. Using an ethnographic approach based on premodern Japanese sources as well as new digital search tools, we focus on time as a set of practices, analysing what sense people made of zodiacs, temple bells, animal behaviour and plant cycles to co-ordinate social activities. The group aims to challenge European-based social theories of time, and their focus on the mechanical clock, in order to better understand Japan’s transition to modernity.
Our research engages with questions that are central to the 21st-century, well beyond Japan, including for instance active participation in the Cambridge CreativeCircular Plastics Centre (CirPlas), with a project on 'Cleanliness, convenience and good citizenship: Plastic and waste in everyday life.'
Key publications include:
Beyond Kawaii: Studying Japanese Femininities at Cambridge, Lit Verlag, 2020.
Cool Japanese Men: Studying New Masculinities, Lit Verlag, 2018.
Japanese politics and international relations
The faculty is a pioneer in work that addresses the politics and international relations of Japan under the direction of Professor John Nilsson-Wright. This has involved a highly productive and successful series of funded research projects coordinated with the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), as well as past and present collaborations with the Nippon Foundation, Daiwa Sōken, Science Po, the Shibusawa Ei’ichi Foundation, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the Japanese Embassy and Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), the Japan Economic Foundation, and partnerships with Hitotsubashi, Keio and Tokyo Universities.
The research, which has both an academic and a policy dimension, includes studies of key developments in Japanese domestic party politics, prime ministerial leadership, alliance politics (especially with the United States), new populist movements in Japan, and contemporary developments in the UK-Japan Relationship.
As a longtime board member of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, Professor Nilsson-Wright is closely involved in bilateral initiatives intended to strengthen ties between the UK and Japan and frequently comments for the international media on Japanese political developments while acting as a consultant and adviser to national governments, think tanks and private companies. The research focus of the program also involves active coordination with European social scientists working on Japan via the European Japan Area Research Network (EJARN).
Past doctoral students in Japanese politics have been successful in securing teaching positions at the Australian National University, Kyoto University, Kings College London and Oxford University and have published influential work dealing, for example, with Japanese local politics, Sino-Japanese relations, Japan’s diplomacy towards Central Asia, and Japan’s Cold War diplomacy.
Key publications include:
Global Britain and Proactive Japan: Developing a 21st Century Partnership, Chatham House, Asia Program, Research Report. London, UK: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2019.
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Korean Studies has a significant history at Cambridge, reflected in the broad teaching interests of faculty members over many years and the strong support that the programme has received from the Korea Foundation in helping establish a permanent lectureship in Korean Studies.
Dr Nuri Kim’s research focuses on modern Korean history including colonialism and postcolonialism, religious history, cultural history, intellectual history, family history, the history of knowledge, and the history of leisure.
Professor John Nilsson-Wright’s work explores North-South relations on the Korean Peninsula, US alliance ties with the Republic of Korea, South Korean domestic politics, populism and wider regional and global issues involving both Koreas. We will soon be joined by an expert in Korean popular culture to widen our offerings and help launch our new MPhil course in East Asian Popular Culture across Time.
Key publications include:
“Ambiguous Founding Father: Tan’gun as a Korean-Japanese God.” Journal of Korean Studies (2021).
The Politics and International Relations of Modern Korea, Routledge, 2016.
Korea and East Asia. The Stony Road to Collective Security, Brill, 2013.
Crisis of Peace and New Leadership in Korea: Lessons of Kim Dae-jung’s Legacies, Yonsei University Press, 2013.
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Research in the faculty frequently transcends the boundaries of individual countries and this is true across many of the disciplines within the faculty. In particular, our social science and modern historical related work involves exploring a number of intersecting themes.
Professor Kushner’s research on the legacy of the Japanese empire has involved a number of pathbreaking studies on propaganda, and postwar criminal trials and notions of justice in East Asia after 1945, involving detailed work in Japanese and Chinese sources.
Professor Bill Hurst’s work on the political economy of China looks at the web of intersecting issues associated with China’s regional reach in East and especially Southeast Asia as both a political and an economic actor, as well as, notably, the importance of Indonesia in the international relations of the region, especially in connection with legal issues and the role of urban and rural politics.
Professor John Nilsson-Wright’s work concentrates on Cold War and post-Cold War US alliance relations in Northeast Asia, particularly with Japan and the Republic of Korea, and the persistent strategic challenge posed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Our transnational research agenda is reflected in our teaching at both the undergraduate and doctoral level where students are encouraged to think comparatively and in our partnerships with other institutions in the university, most notably with the Centre for Geopolitics (within Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH)) where Professors Hurst and Nilsson-Wright coordinate the centre’s Indo-Pacific research strand.
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