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Social structures, ideologies, mentalitée, religious institutions, legal history, historical documents and international trade in Medieval Japan

Professor Amira K Bennison
The medieval Islamic West; 18th-19th century Muslim religio-political discourse and state structures especially in the Maghrib; Islamic cultural history

Dr Jonathan Duquette
Sanskrit intellectual history, classical Indian philosophy, logic and textual hermeneutics, early modernity, modern history of pandits, digital humanities

Professor Geoffrey Khan
Semitic philological and linguistic studies, particularly of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. Also endangered dialects of Neo-Aramaic and the history of Judaeo-Arabic, including modern spoken varieties.

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 Andrew Marsham
Islamic History; Late Antiquity; Political Culture in Early Islam; Empire and State Formation; Arabic Historiography; Comparative and Transregional History

Dr Elizabeth Monier
Citizenship and state-building; conceptual and political history; societal cohesion and security; geopolitics; diplomacy and development; religion and international relations.

Professor James Montgomery
History of ideas in classical Islam; classical Arabic literature; literary translation.

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 John Nilsson-Wright
Cold War relationship between the USA & NE Asia, particularly Japan & the two Koreas; contemporary regional security issues, foreign policy & domestic politics

Professor Yaron Peleg
Modern Hebrew literary history; Israeli cinema and culture; the creation and legacy of a native Hebrew culture at the beginning of the 20th century

Dr Brigitte Steger ブリギッテ・シテーガ
Japanese society, with emphasis on the cultural history and anthropology of daily life, including studies of sleep, gender, household waste (incl. plastics) and the impact of the 2011 tsunami.

Professor Roel Sterckx FBA
Classical and literary Chinese language and philology; cultural history of pre-imperial and early imperial China; text and manuscript studies

Professor Hans van de Ven FBA
History of the Chinese Communist Party before 1949; the history of warfare in modern China; Chinese globalization in the 1850-1950 period

Professor Vincenzo Vergiani
History of linguistic ideas and the philosophy of language in ancient India, including the role of grammar in the history of Sanskrit