- The Philip Leverhulme Prize worth £100,000 was awarded to Dr Jennifer Coates for being a leader in her field of Japanese film studies, visual media and cultural studies
- The £100,000 prize will be used to further Dr Coates’ research into how the persona of people in the public eye is transmitted through the visual and performing arts, and how that shapes our understanding of Japan
- The Leverhulme Trust awards £3 million each year to 30 outstanding early career researchers across the UK whose work attracts international recognition
Dr Jennifer Coates from the University of Sheffield’s School of East Asian Studies (SEAS) has been awarded a prestigious £100,000 prize by the Philip Leverhulme Trust to further her promising career in Japanese cinema and culture.
Dr Jennifer Coates, a Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at SEAS, was chosen out of 400 nominations in the Leverhulme Trust’s ‘Visual and Performing Arts’ category for being an exceptional early career researcher whose work has attracted international recognition.
Dr Coates will use the prize to support a new project, ‘Personifying Japan: Celebrity, Star Persona, and Curatorship in the Transmission of Japanese Arts and Cultures’; furthering her research into how the persona of people in the public eye is transmitted through the visual and performing arts, and how that shapes our understanding of Japan.
In an age of ‘celebrity politics’, it is hoped the research will contribute to the development of a new media literacy, in which we learn how to better evaluate and judge those with claims to power and authority through their constructed public personas and how they represent nations, political moments or historical events.
Dr Coates said: “It’s quite surprising to receive the award! Japanese Studies sometimes feels like quite a small and specific field, so it's really nice to see a broader interest in Japanese cultural studies in the UK.
“Japan has a long, interesting history of leveraging the visual and performing arts for political and global influence, or what we call ‘soft power’. This can be through cinema, television, photography, contemporary museum curation, food culture, and digital arts, and studying this can contribute significantly to our understanding of how people represent themselves, and how this can shape our understanding of a country and culture like Japan.”
Dr Coates was nominated for the prize by the Professor of East Asian Cinema and Head of SEAS, Kate Taylor-Jones, she said: “Jen has shown herself to be a leader in the promotion and development of the field of Japanese cinema studies in the UK and beyond.
“She has been instrumental in bringing together Japanese and western academics in the field of cinema, and internationally she is a highly sought-after speaker who has presented at most of the leading subject conferences and beyond.
“I hope that his award will demonstrate the breadth and quality of the work that is produced by scholars at SEAS.”
Dr Coates teaches several undergraduate modules at the University of Sheffield and has studied, researched and taught on a global scale, including in Japan, Australia and the U.S.
As well as being published in internationally recognised journals on various topics, ranging from Japanese and East Asian cinema to gender studies, she has also incorporated her passion and research on Japanese cultural studies into two books, one of which is currently in development.
Dr Coates commented: “The freedom of the Philip Leverhulme Prize gives me a lot of space to experiment with ideas, and explore how we study popular culture.
“Studying any cultures other than our own can be valuable in so many ways, by exposing our preconceptions and assumptions, expanding our understanding of how life can be lived, opening up areas of similarity as well as difference, and prompting us to think from a position of shared humanity.
“I think that postdoctoral positions and research-focused roles for early career staff are essential for universities to develop research potential, so I’m grateful for the support of trusts like the Leverhulme, and hopeful that we’ll see some more research support at the early career level being built into university planning and hiring initiatives.”
Anna Vignoles, Director of the Leverhulme Trust, said: “I am delighted that we have been able to award these prestigious prizes to such a stunningly talented group of academics. This round was more competitive than ever and the judges had an incredibly difficult task. This is evident from the achievements of the winners, who are working on a very diverse set of topics, from the physics of dark matter to climate science, from research into policing and inequality through to participatory art.”
