Experts from the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield have been awarded £4m to undertake world-class research and provide advanced research training in Japanese and Chinese Studies as part of a government drive to strengthen Britain’s specialised research capacity in the area.

The White Rose East Asia Centre (WREAC) will be one of five new collaborative centres set up to create a world class pool of researchers who will enhance the UK’s understanding of the Arabic-speaking world, China, Japan and Eastern Europe, including areas of the former Soviet Union. An in-depth understanding of these areas is of cultural, political and economic importance to the UK, and the development of necessary language skills will be central to the work of the centres.

The initiative is jointly funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) as part of a £25m Language Based Area Studies initiative.

The two universities are already leading trainers and providers in Europe of graduate and postgraduate students in East Asian Studies. Both universities teach a full range of courses in both Chinese and Japanese, though Leeds has the longer history of teaching Chinese and Sheffield, Japanese. During the past five years they have together graduated over 300 postgraduate taught students and, over the past ten years, 55 doctoral students. By joining forces, the WREAC has a total of 17 specialists working on China, 11 on Japan, and a further 12 in related areas of Asian Studies. It also has formal links with some 30 universities in China and Japan, including Tokyo and Nanjing.

The Centre’s director, Professor Victor King, explains: “With the emergence of shared East Asian patterns of consumerism and popular culture and an increase in levels of economic integration, the case for studying China and Japan together is increasingly strong.”

In developing national capacity in East Asian Studies the Centre will be appointing four new early career fellows, two new postdoctoral fellows and recruiting a large cohort of taught Masters and research students. The Centre has an ambitious programme of seminars and conferences planned to involve international and British-based scholars, and specially designed workshops for the user community, including business, and the public and voluntary sectors. It has already signed formal agreements for academic cooperation with various European universities and is currently negotiating other agreements.

White Rose University Consortium Chief Executive Dr Julian White welcomed the award, saying: “This investment is an opportunity to further develop our international reputation as a Centre of Excellence in East Asian research and training that will create structured career opportunities and encourage new generations of highly skilled researchers into language based studies.”

For more information, contact:
Jo Kelly, campuspr (for the White Rose Consortium), +44 113 258 9880, jokelly@campuspr.co.uk

Or visit the WREAC website http://www.wreac.org/index.html

The five new Centres are:

• White Rose East Asia Centre (WREAC). The Centre will be managed by an Executive Board with Professor King as its overall Director and Professors Flemming Christiansen (Leeds) and Glenn Hook (Sheffield) as Academic Directors of Chinese and Japanese respectively.
• The British Interuniversity China Centre (BICC), a collaboration between the Universities of Oxford, Bristol and Manchester.
• A research centre looking at Eastern Europe based at the University of Glasgow, with collaboration from St Andrew's University and the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Paisley, Strathclyde, Newcastle and Nottingham.
• The centre studying the Arabic-speaking world led by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the Universities of Durham and Manchester.
• Centre for East European and Former Soviet Union Language Based Area Studies led by UCL working with the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham.