Rate My Professor Rebekah Clements

Rebekah Clements is an ICREA Research Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies. She is a cultural historian of Japan, specializing in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), with research that examines Japanese early modernity in the East Asian context using textual and material-culture sources. Clements completed degrees in law and Asian studies at the Australian National University, where she received the University Medal in Asian Studies in 2005, and earned her PhD in East Asian History from Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in 2012.

Her career includes a Leverhulme-funded research associate position at Cambridge's Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and a Junior Research Fellowship at Queens' College (2012-2015). From 2015 to 2018, she held a lectureship advancing to associate professorship at Durham University. At UAB since 2018, she led the ERC-funded Starting Grant project "Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592-1598" (2018-2024), investigating the environmental, technological, and social legacies of the Imjin War, including the lives of Korean captives in Japan. She recently received an ERC Consolidator Grant for "Consuming Nature: Early Modernity, Popular Culture and the Natural World in Japan, 1600-1900." Notable awards include the 2023 Vandervort Prize from the Society for Military History for her article co-authored with Baihui Duan, "Fighting for Forests: Protection and Exploitation of Kŏje Island Timber during the East Asian War of 1592-1598" (Environmental History, 2022). Key publications encompass A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2015), "Alternate Attendance Parades in the Japanese Domain of Satsuma, Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries" (Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2022), "Brush Talk as the ‘Lingua Franca’ of East Asian Diplomacy" (The Historical Journal, 2019), and editorship of The Aftermath of the Imjin War in Early Modern East Asia with James B. Lewis. Her scholarship significantly influences understandings of early modern East Asian interactions, translation history, and environmental history.