Dr. Laura Dales serves as Discipline Chair of Asian Studies and Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Her primary research interests encompass agency, sexuality, friendship, and dating across Asia, with a particular focus on singlehood and marriage in contemporary Japan. She is currently writing a book stemming from an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) project that investigates friendship and intimacy beyond the family in Japan. Since 2020, she has collaborated with Dr. Nora Kottmann on a project funded by the German Institute of Japanese Studies, Tokyo, exploring intimate practices among unmarried individuals in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dales' expertise aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goal 5 on Gender Equality, covering topics such as Japanese society, marriage, friendship, gender, femininities and masculinities, marriage and singlehood in Asia, feminisms, sexuality and gender in Japan, women's groups, agency, and feminist ethnography.

Dales' academic career includes appointments as JSPS Postdoctoral Research Fellow from 2009 to 2010 and Lecturer in Japanese at the School of Communications, International Studies and Languages, University of South Australia from 2005 to 2009. She has held the ARC DECRA from 2010 to 2016 (project DE120101702) and the JSPS Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Recent funding includes a School Strategic Grant in September 2024 with Y. Tao. Her influential publications include 'Feminist movements in contemporary Japan' (2009), 'Ohitorisama, singlehood and agency in Japan' (2017), 'Online Konkatsu and the Gendered Ideals of Marriage in Contemporary Japan' (2016), 'Language in fieldwork: Making visible the ethnographic impact of the researcher's linguistic fluency' (2016), 'Introduction: The everyday agency of women in Asia' (2017), 'Doing Intimacy in Pandemic Times: Findings of a Large-Scale Survey Among Singles in Japan' (2023, with N. Kottmann), and 'Femininity and masculinity' in the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Japan (2021, with F. Taga). She also serves as International Advisor to the Osaka Gender Equality Foundation since 2009.

Professional Email: laura.dales@uwa.edu.au