University College Cork

Kiri Paramore is Professor of Asian Studies in the National University of Ireland, University College Cork, where he directs the Irish Institute of Chinese Studies and the Irish Institute of Japanese Studies. His expertise lies in the politics and history of East Asia, with a focus on the interaction between politics and culture. 

Born and raised in Sydney, he studied Asian Studies and Asian History at the Australian National University, Canberra (B.A.S. (1997) Hons. (1999)). While completing his studies he worked for the Australian Department of Defence, and after graduation the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Under the auspices of a Japanese Ministry of Education and Science research scholarship he completed two postgraduate degrees at the University of Tokyo (M.A. 2003, Ph.D. 2006). Both dissertations were written in Japanese, using predominantly Chinese sources.  Between 2007 and 2019 he taught International Studies and Asian Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taipei, the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and a number of institutes and universities in Japan.

He is the author of Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2016), (a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award winner, 2016), Ideology and Christianity in Japan (Routledge, 2009), and Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies (Bloomsbury, 2016). His articles have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of Early Modern History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of Japanese Studies, and the Proceedings of the British Academy, etc. He currently serves as chief editor of the Cambridge History of Confucianism, and as one of the authors of the Cambridge History of Democracy, and the New Cambridge History of Japan.