skip to content

Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

 

Current Research

Professor Mikael Adolphson
Social structures, ideologies, mentalitée, religious institutions, legal history, historical documents and international trade in Medieval Japan

Dr Po-Hsi Chen
His dissertation, 'Socialism on One Island: A Genealogy of the Pro-Unification Leftist Literary Discourse in Taiwan', won the Marston Anderson Prize for outstanding dissertation in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. It situates the politics of emotions in Cold War Taiwanese literature within transnational radical movements. More specifically, by tracing the cross-Strait and transpacific circuit of banned books, radio short waves, spoken drama, and the ‘red classics’ propaganda films, he analyses how postwar left-wing writers from Taiwan perceived the ambivalent legacies of China’s troubled revolutionary trajectory. His research interests include literary exchange across the Chinese-language world during the Cold War era, Marxist literary and aesthetic theories, and the global sixties.

Dr Heather Inwood
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
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 Barak Kushner
Modern East Asian history - including Japan, Taiwan, and China - in particular the wartime, postwar imperial dissolution of the Japanese Empire, and the Cold War in East Asia, as well as history of war crimes, memory politics and the pursuit of justice.

Professor Laura Moretti
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
Modern and contemporary Japanese literature; Okinawan studies; writing by minorities in Japan; postcolonial studies; feminist criticism; translation theory.