PhD Japanese Studies / Overview

Japanese Studies was established at Manchester in 2007 and quickly grew a large undergraduate programme with a small but expanding graduate cluster attached. Japanese Studies in Manchester focuses on modern and contemporary Japan and offers supervision of postgraduate research projects connected to the broader issues of gender, education, religion, society and history. In particular we offer specialist supervision on mass culture, subcultural formations and cultural production, contemporary and modern religious organizations and movements, modern medical and educational and cultural history, and gender and women in culture, medicine, reproduction, and society. Anthropological, sociological, textual and gender and cultural studies approaches are supported. There is a focus on cross-disciplinary research and co-supervision linking research in Japanese Studies with other disciplines. 

Applicants are asked to make direct contact with individual academic members of staff whose research interests and approach seem to most closely resemble their own, before submitting an application, in order to find a potential supervisor. Please contact Aya Homei for proposals linked to medicine, reproduction and gender; Erica Baffelli for religion and society; Jonathan Bunt for language and linguistics with media and film; Peter Cave for education with history and anthropology; and Sharon Kinsella for visual culture, popular cultures, media studies.

In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) Japanese Studies was assessed as part of the University of Manchester's 'Modern Languages and Linguistics' submission. In REF2014 the University of Manchester has been confirmed as a leading centre for research in Modern Languages and Linguistics, ranking third in the UK in terms of research power (an established criterion which values research quality in relation to the number of staff submitted). We achieved joint fourth in terms of the overall amount of 'world-leading' (4*) research activity and 80% of our research was judged to be in the highest two categories (4* or 3*). Specifically, 73% of our publications were judged as either 'world-leading' (4*) or 'internationally excellent' (3*); moreover, 85% of our research activity achieved 'outstanding' (4*) or `very considerable¿ (3*) public impact in areas spanning policy, public discourse, education, cultural life and society. Our research environment was also judged to be strong, with 100% judged to be 'world-leading' (4*) or 'internationally excellent' (3*).