About

I am a subtitler, translator and institutionally unaffiliated scholar of philosophy, intellectual history, political studies and translation studies. I have held research and teaching positions at Winchester, Nottingham and Roehampton in the UK, at University College Cork and University College Dublin in Ireland, and at the University of Tokyo and Temple University in Japan. I am based in Ireland and Spain.

I was born into a Danish and Japanese-speaking family in the Danish-German borderland. I grew up in India, Kenya, Japan, and Denmark and read politics and anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. I moved to London to study for an MSc at the School of Oriental and African Studies and spent 16 years there. In 2010 I crossed the Irish Sea for a PhD with Graham Parkes of University College Cork and David Williams of Cardiff University. It was awarded with no corrections in January 2014. From 2015-2017 I worked with Nakajima Takahiro at the University of Tokyo and taught at Temple University Japan.

Growing up between cultures and languages and commercial language work has fed into my research methods and informed my theoretical concerns with questions of language, culture, subjectivity, and meaning in political thought and practice.

The focus of my intellectual interests has moved over the years from the theory and history of international politics to cross-culturally comparative political thought. The primary focus of my research is the political thought of the Kyoto School of philosophy, especially its second generation and left wing. This is branching out into an interest in related developments among liberal, often Christian, political thinkers in Tokyo in the same period, which is to say from around 1930 to 1945.