Daiwa Scholars in Japanese Studies 2024
Three Daiwa Scholars in Japanese Studies have been selected in the programme’s tenth year.
We will be supporting their postgraduate studies at Edinburgh University, the University of East Anglia and the University of Oxford.
Announcing the new Daiwa Scholars, Jason James, Director General of The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, said:
“We selected three new Daiwa Scholars in Japanese Studies on Friday 8th March. Two of our new Scholars are working on Japanese literature and on translating it into English. This is a field in which an enormous amount of work remains to be done, and happily, Japanese literature is extremely popular at the moment. The third Scholar works in linguistics and aims to contribute to the reconstruction of proto-Japanese, the ancestor of both the Japanese and Okinawan languages.”
You can see the Scholars’ profiles (at the time of selection) with photographs via this PDF.
DSJS 2024 PROFILES with photos
About the scholars
Adelheid Clark
Adelheid (Heidi) first visited Japan in 2015, on a two-week school exchange at Aoyama Gakuin High School in Tokyo. Following her GCSEs, she returned to Aoyama Gakuin for a year, taking classes alongside the Japanese pupils. Back at school in the UK the following year, she continued learning Japanese through weekly tutoring sessions. She completed a BA in Japanese at the University of Cambridge in 2024. She spent a year at Hokkaido University as part of her degree. Heidi is interested in translating overlooked works of literature from Japan, and in new and creative approaches to translation. Her undergraduate dissertation explored the potential of Skopos Theory to analyse translation choices in contemporary Japanese versions of the Heart Sutra, a major Buddhist text. She began an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in September 2024. Heidi’s aim is to be a literary translator, working from Japanese to English. She is keen to promote Ainu literature and works of female and non-binary authors.
Claire Demenez
Claire graduated from the University of Edinburgh, where she completed an MA (Scot) in Japanese in 2019. She spent a year at the International Christian University in Tokyo as part of her degree. After working at the Consulate General of Japan in Edinburgh, she returned to the University of Edinburgh where she is now pursuing a Master’s by Research degree in Japanese Studies. Her research focusses on disaster literature and developing a comparative analysis of the place and role of literature in the aftermath of the 1 September 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake and the 11 March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Her research so far has concentrated on Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s writings in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake and on Hideo Furukawa’s post-3.11 novel Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale that Begins with Fukushima. Alongside her research, she is undertaking training in literary translation from Japanese into English and is interested in the role of translation in studies of Japanese literature.
Ruskin Harding
Having studied Japanese for over a decade, Ruskin completed a BA in Japanese at the University of Oxford in 2023, specializing in linguistics and the history of the Japanese language. Since graduating, Ruskin has been working at Oxford as a Research Assistant on the Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese (ONCOJ), a collaborative project with the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL). This has included translating a substantial portion of extant Old Japanese (OJ) texts, including the Man’yōshū and the songs in the Kojiki as well as helping to correct and compile an OJ-English dictionary. In October 2024, they began a DPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. Ruskin’s research project aims to discover the origins of the Japanese language. A complete and up-to-date reconstruction of proto-Japonic, the ancestor of Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages, is currently a major gap in East Asian linguistics and has the potential to radically improve our understanding of Japonic languages, both ancient and modern.