Staff Research Interests

Chako Amano

Chako Amano has been teaching Japanese as a foreign language for over 20 years. While she is interested in all aspects of TJFL, her main focus has been on how best the students’ learning can be facilitated. Her special interest lies in various holistic approaches to language teaching and learning, including the Waldorf approach. She regards herself as an educator who is interested in facilitating students’ overall learning and growth through the language acquisition process.

Tim Behrend

Dr Tim Behrend is an Indonesianist with a particular interest in the cultural and intellectual history of Java in the 18-19th century. He has written extensively about all aspects of the Javanese manuscript tradition including the sociology of textual production in pre-print Java, the effects of the mechanisation of print on the production and uses of literature, and technical aspects of manuscript illumination and illustration. He is also interested in questions of religion in contemporary Indonesian politics and society. Since the Bali bombings his research has focused on some individuals and organisations suspected of involvement in political violence. He has recently published several articles on Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, the cleric accused of heading Jemaah Islamiyah, a radical Islamist group that is widely considered to have been behind the bombings. 

Hilary Chung 

Area of research interest: gender and representation in modern literature in a comparative context.  While her early research focused on the representation of women in the work of male novelists in Republican China she is currently engaged in a wide-ranging comparative project which examines male representations of the feminine in times of cultural transition, a study of how modern gender indenties are re/constructed and re/inscribed in literature at times of crisis in cultural consciousness.  A second project in preparation,  planned in conjunction with colleagues in Art History and Comparative Literature, and emerging from the international conference the Poetics of Exile (http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/SELL/complit) is a study in the visual, poetic, literary and performative expression and representation of exile and displacement in Australasia and the Pacific.

Paul Clark

Paul Clark is Professor of Chinese in the School of Asian Studies and Director of the China Studies Centre in the New Zealand Asia Institute.  Earlier he spent ten years as a Research Fellow at The East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai'i where he helped programme the Hawai'i International Film Festival.  Clark went to Beijing in 1974 as a New Zealand exchange student, studying Chinese history at Peking University in 1975-1976.  His PhD was in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard.  He is the author of Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (Cambridge University Press), 'Hauhau': The Pai Marire Search for Maori Identity (Auckland/Oxford University Press) and numerous articles and book chapters on Chinese film and popular culture.  He is currently completing a book on China's fifth-generation filmmakers.  His current research is for a book-length cultural history of the Cultural Revolution, concentrating on the performing arts.

Manying Ip

For over a decade Dr Manying Ip's research has focused on the history of Chinese New Zealanders, both as a visible ethnic minority in New Zealand and also as a far-flung outpost of the global Chinese diaspora. Recently, the scope of her research has expanded to cover the issues of trans-nationalism and return migration. Two current research projects are underway: one is entitled "Maori-Chinese Encounters: the Indigenous and the Immigrant"; the other examines the conglomerate of issues that are linked to new Chinese migrants who have arrived in New Zealand over the last 15 years.

Wayne Lawrence

Dr Wayne Lawrence is a linguist whose main field of research is the phonology of Japanese, both segmental and supra-segmental. His special interest is the accentual systems of both Tokyo Japanese and regional dialects.  Most recent research has been connected with vowel feature underspecification in various Japanese dialects, and the genetic interrelationships of the Ryukyuan dialects.  Other research interests include internal reconstruction of aspects of pre-Old Japanese, and the cross-linguistic semantics of prepositions/postpositions. 

Richard Phillips

Dr Richard Phillips researches on the history of China in the Republican period (1912-1949), with a particular focus on those areas of China which were occupied by Japanese forces between 1931 and 1945, including the nominally independent Manzhouguo (Manchukuo). Through the use of Chinese and Japanese source materials, he seeks to investigate the experiences of the Chinese within these occupied areas and the expectations of the Japanese as they strove to expand and consolidate their Asian holdings. Thus his work embraces social, economic and political history and includes a comparative aspect in the fields of colonialism, national resistance and collaboration studies.  

Rumi Sakamoto 

Dr Rumi Sakamoto's  research is focused on issues surrounding Japanese national and cultural identity from the 19th century to the present. She is currently co-editing a book on globalisation, popular culture and Japan.  Other projects include an analysis of nationalism in neo-conservative discourse during the 1990s and a study of  de-territorialised identities in diaspora literature.  

Tomoko Shimoda

Tomoko Shimoda’s research interests are in gender issues and the media in contemporary Japan. Before becoming an academic, she worked as a television announcer in Japan, an experience that motivates and informs her research interests in this field. Her current research focuses on the portrayal of motherhood and fatherhood in the Japanese media to assess how these have been influenced by significant changes in Japanese family structure and family life.

Changzoo Song 

Dr Changzoo Song studied Political Science and Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His research interests include the politico-cultural dimensions of nationalism, diaspora and globalisation both in Korean and the global context. He is currently involved in the following projects: (1) the relationship between homeland and Korean diasporas; (2) ethnic Korean watermelon growers in Ukraine and garment manufacturers in Los Angeles in terms of their entrepreneurial/cultural adaptations and global networking of diasporas; (3) Korean immigrants' Japanese restaurant business in the US, Europe, and Oceania.    

Inshil Yoon

Dr Inshil Yoon's research has focused on the most popular Korean classic on the environment, T'aengniji, leading to the publication of a book, Yi Chung-Hwan's T'aengnij, The Korean Classic of Choosing Settlements (1998).  She has also done a biographical study of Yi Chung-Hwan, the author of this 18th work, and has studied his relationship with the prominent Practical Learning scholar Yi Ik. Her current work concentrates on developing language teaching materials, especially for New ZealandIntermediateSchools and Colleges. This has led to the publication of an article on Korean language teaching in schools and material development in New Zealand, and the first volume of a Korean textbook series, Nami, Annyeong? Beginner's Korean for Intermediate Schools.

Nora Yao 

Nora Yao has a focused interest in TCFL learning strategies and the teaching methodology, particularly the learning of the oral communicative skills and its conflicts with the Chinese character learning, how various approaches of leaning can be complementary to each other for the proficiency of the language. She is also interested in other general TCFL pedagogical issues. Her current work concentrates on developing a new type of textbook series for CFL students at tertiary level.