Staff profile

I am a member of the BA Japanese Studies programme at Durham University, where I convene Japanese Language 1B and 1A/2B, and co-teach Japanese Language 4, and Critical Methods for the Study of Japanese Literature and History, as well as Specialised Translation (English to Japanese) within the MA in Translation Studies. I also serve as the Year Abroad Coordinator, providing guidance and support to students preparing for academic exchanges in Japan. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

My first degree was in Linguistics at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, and I completed my MA and PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of East Anglia. Before joining Durham University in 2021, I worked as a teaching associate in Japanese at the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield (2020), and as a postdoctoral research associate at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University (2021).

My research explores the intersection of linguistics and health communication, with a particular focus on patient–doctor interactions, patient narratives, public health messaging, media representations of autism and learning disabilities, and literary depictions of illness and disease. My work is grounded in discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and ethnographic methods, employing qualitative approaches. I am trained in patient interviewing for healthcare research, collaborating with health and social care practitioners in the UK and Japan.

I am the author of Patient-centred Communication: Discourse of In-home Medical Consultations for Older Adults (Multilingual Matters, 2022), a monograph examining the dynamics of medical consultations in ageing populations. I am also co-editor of Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy (Bloomsbury, 2022), a volume that addresses key challenges in crisis communication, from negotiating cross-national concerns to fostering empathy.

Currently, I am working on my second monograph and co-editing the forthcoming volume Healthcare, Language, and Inclusivity (Routledge). My ongoing research examines media and literary texts on autism and learning disabilities in Japan and the UK, with a focus on the role of inclusive language in shaping public understanding.

• Autism spectrum disorder
• Clinical consultation
• Dialogism
• Discourse analysis
• Learning disability
• Medical linguistics
• Patient-doctor interaction