NAME

POSITION

FIELD

PROFILE

PHOTO

Kimi Akita

Associate professor

My research interests concern iconic phenomena in language. I am especially interested in how cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and linguistic typology can explain the grammatical, functional, and developmental properties of ideophones (aka giongo / gitaigo or onomatopoeia).

I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from Kobe University in 2009. I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo (2009-2011) and the University of California, Berkeley (2009-2010). I then taught Cognitive Linguistics at Osaka University (2011-2015) before joining the Department of Applied Linguistics (2015-2017) and the Department of English Linguistics (2017-present) at Nagoya University. I am also a visiting associate professor at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics.

Edward Haig

Professor

My current research interests include ecolinguistics (both the language of ecology and the ecology of language); the ideological use of language in Japanese and English news media; the interrelations between public and private discourses of youth, crime and class; and the language of radio broadcasting. Recently I have begun studying the earliest English newspapers and pamphlets published around the time of the English Civil War. The two main theoretical and methodological tools that I use in my research are systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis.

I am a professor in the Graduate School of Humanities' English Education Department. I have an M.Sc. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (Aston University, UK) and Ph.D.s in Ecology (King's College London, UK) and Linguistics (Lancaster University, UK).

Makoto Hayashi

Associate professor

My research focuses on examining language as it is used in everyday conversation. One of the main themes of my work is to explore the structural orderliness in language use (which we think of as 'grammar') as an emergent, embodied, and activity-bound phenomenon. I have pursued this theme in articles published in a range of recognized journals, such as Language in Society, Journal of Pragmatics and Discourse Processes, as well as in book chapters. I use Conversation Analysis as the main methodological framework for discovering orderly ways in which humans deploy language to participate in everyday activities and jointly construct the social world which they inhabit.

I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2000. I taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 16 years before I joined the faculty of Nagoya University in 2016. I am the author of Joint Utterance Construction in Japanese Conversation (John Benjamins, 2003) and a co-editor of Conversational Repair and Human Understanding (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Kaoru Horie

Professor

My research interest centers around two areas: (i) a typological and contrastive analysis of complex sentences and grammaticalization phenomena in Asian and European languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Khmer, Marathi, Mongolian and Vietnamese; (ii) the pragmatics/grammar interface.

I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California in 1993. I am currently a professor of Linguistics at Nagoya University. I was formerly at Tohoku University, where I served as the director of the Center of Excellence (COE) program in humanities and promoted interdisciplinary studies on language, cognition, brain and typology.

Shinji Ido

Associate professor

My research is concerned with linguistic (sound) changes resulting from language contact.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Sydney in 2002. I am currently an associate professor of Linguistics at Nagoya University. My previous publications include Agglutinative Information: A Study of Turkish Incomplete Sentences (2003) and Tacikçe Dilbilgisi [Tajic Grammar] (2006).

Sang-Mi Kim

Associate professor

My research concerns the social and psychological impacts of media communication and information technologies (such as mobile devices, the Internet and television), Information Behavior (IB), network communication, the social and cultural impacts of digital technology and culture. I am also currently focusing on the digital divide and gender inequalities.

I received my Bachelor of Arts from Ewha Womans University (Korea) and my MA and Ph.D. in Socio-Information from the University of Tokyo.

Chikako Matsushita

Professor

My research interests include feminist theory, sexuality studies, literature and theory, visual culture and subcultures.

I received my Ph.D. in Literature from Nagoya University in 2007 on narratologies and queer readings of modern American novels. I am the author of Kuia Monogatariron [Queer Narratologies], Jimbunshoin, Japan, 2009) and the co-director of the film Allies (2009). I received the 16th Fukuhara Award for English Literature in 2008.

Dylan McGee

Designated associate professor

My principal field of research is Japanese literature of the Edo period (1603-1868), with a focus on the history of book publication, circulation and reception. In addition to several translations of early modern Japanese narrative fiction and poetry, I have also published articles on the works of Ueda Akinari (1734-1809), the history of amateur chaban kyōgen performance, and the development of clock-based narrative time in the popular genres of kibyōshi and sharebon (1780-1796). At present, I am writing a monograph on the history of the Daiso lending library, which operated in Nagoya between 1767 and 1899 and rose to status as the largest commercial lender in Japan.

I earned my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Japanese/Chinese) from Princeton University (2009) after conducting research for my dissertation at Kanazawa University (2004-2005). I have been working as a designated associate professor at Nagoya University since 2011.

Koji Miwa

Associate professor

As a psycholinguist, who takes an experimental approach to the linguistic issue of how language is "done" in the mind, I am primarily investigating (1) how complex words are represented/processed in the mind, (2) how bilinguals read in one language with two languages in the mind, and (3) how language affects thought. That is, I am interested in the mechanisms by which complex things are processed effortlessly and efficiently in our daily life, which often happens at a subconscious level.

I received a B.A. (Hons) and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Alberta (Canada). I then spent two years in Tuebingen (Germany) as a Humboldt postdoctoral researcher. I have been working as an associate professor at Nagoya University since 2017.

Remi Murao

Associate professor

My primary research area is second language processing. I am particularly interested in phonological processing in spoken word recognition, and the mapping of continuous speech sounds onto the mental lexicon. My Ph.D. work focused on the influence of prosody and the formulaicity of language on the recognition of spoken words.

I received a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Nagoya University in 2009. My first academic position was as an assistant professor at Waseda University in 2007, where I taught English to undergraduate students for three years. Apart from academics, I enjoy playing the violin in an amateur orchestra.

Akitoshi Nagahata

Professor

My area of study is American literature and culture, with a focus on poetry. I have published articles on Modernist and contemporary American poets (including Pound, Stevens, Ashbery and Ginsberg), and post-war American novelists (Thomas Pynchon, John Barth) and artists (Bob Dylan, Woody Allen), among others.

I have M.A.s in English Studies (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) and English (State University of New York at Albany). I have been teaching at Nagoya University since 1988.

Yoshikazu Oshima

Associate professor

My principal research fields are semantics, pragmatics, and syntax. I have mainly worked on the contemporary Japanese language, with strong interests in general linguistics and typology. The topics I have recently worked on include: (i) the semantics of discourse particles in Japanese, (ii) the usage of anaphoric demonstratives in Japanese and English, (iii) the semantics of marked/biased interrogative constructions, (iv) the taxonomy of "backgrounded" meaning (presupposition and conventional implicature), and (v) the semantic characteristics of Japanese stative predicates.

I am an associate professor of Linguistics in the Graduate School of Humanities. I earned an M.A. from the University of Tokyo in 1999, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2006. I taught at Arizona State University and Ibaraki University before taking up my current appointment, and have been a researcher at Kobe University, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and the University of Texas at Austin.

Katsuo Tamaoka

Professor

I have specialized in psycholinguistics, the interdisciplinary study of psychology and linguistics, to investigate how humans are able to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Due to the nature of this discipline, multiple languages, such as Japanese, English, Korean, Chinese, Turkish and Sinhalese are investigated in the search for universal rules for human language processing. Acquisition of Japanese as a second language by faculty of various language backgrounds are also covered in my studies.

I completed my Ph.D. in the area of lexical access by Japanese children at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada in 1990.

Since then, I have been a lecturer at Matsuyama University, an associate professor and a full professor at Hiroshima University, a professor at Reitaku University and a professor at Nagoya University from 2009 to the present. I belong to various societies such as the Psychonomic Society, the Linguistic Society of Japan and the Japanese Cognitive Science Society.

Takashi Wakui

Professor

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on modern Japanese poetry. Since then, I have published papers on modern Japanese literature, particularly on its relationship with astronomy and stargazing. I have also translated Japanese poems into English. In the field of animation studies I have written a paper on Terada Torahiko and Oskar Fischinger. As a regular attendee at the Hiroshima Animation Festival since the mid-90s, I have witnessed the evolution of the art form in recent decades as well as gained knowledge about its varied forms around the world.

I received an M.A.in comparative literature from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and cultures from Columbia University in New York.

Alex Watson

Associate professor

My main field of research is British literature of the Romantic period (roughly 1778-1832) with a particular interest in post-colonialism and reception in Asia. I have an additional related interest in twentieth-century British film and culture.

I was awarded a D.Phil. from the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK in 2007. My first book, Romantic Marginality (Pickering and Chatto, 2012) examined the role of annotation in British Romantic-period literature. I have authored scholarly articles on a variety of topics, from Romanticism to J. G. Ballard to Roland Barthes. I am currently co-editing with Laurence Williams (University of Tokyo) a collection of scholarly essays examining British Romanticism in Asia. I am also completing the manuscript of a textbook on British Cinema and a monograph exploring the status of Romantic discourses of ruin in late-twentieth-century British literature. I am also a regular contributor to Wall Street International and one of the organizers of the Tokyo Humanities Project.

Junko Yamashita

Professor

The field of my research broadly relates to second language acquisition and foreign language education. More specifically, my primary research interests are in factors causing individual differences in second language reading ability, cross-linguistic influence in second language processing, and instruction and assessment of second language reading.

I received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Lancaster University, UK. I have been teaching EFL (English as a Foreign Language) courses at the undergraduate level and second language acquisition courses at the graduate level at Nagoya University, Japan. I have also been serving as an advisor for M.A. and Ph.D. theses. I was a visiting scholar at Georgia State University and Carnegie Mellon University (USA) from 2007 to 2008.

Eiko Yasui

Lecturer

I specialize in conversation analysis, a micro-analytic approach to human interaction based on videotaped conversational data. I am specifically interested in how people employ language and body behaviors to accomplish participation in various conversational activities, such as storytelling, in natural everyday conversational settings where people usually simultaneously engage in multiple activities (eating, cooking, typing and so on).

I received a B.A from Osaka University in English Linguistics, an M.A. from Michigan State University in Communication and a Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin in Communication Studies.