Staff include both established scholars with an international reputation and talented young academics who are rapidly making their mark in Japanese Studies.
Research lies at the heart of the section's activities.
Each member of staff is an active researcher and a very supportive research culture exists. Being a small unit, informal intellectual exchange comes easily and this is supplemented both by workshops, where staff and postgraduate students report on their current research and receive valuable feedback, and by seminars addressed by invited scholars. The Howat seminars, as they are known, are generously funded by the Howat Charitable Trust, thereby enabling us to invite leading scholars in their fields to present papers on their research. The principal research interests of the staff lie in the fields of history, politics, international relations, political economy, the labour movement, business and management and sociolinguistics. Professor John Crump, who holds the WYWY Chair of Japanese Studies, has published numerous books and articles on socialist and anarchist thought and is currently studying the role played by employers' organisations within Japanese capitalism.