Paul O'Shea

I completed a joint Ph.D. at the University of Sheffield and Tohoku University, Japan, in 2012. After this I moved to Scandinavia, and have been here ever since. I started in Stockholm, as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Stockholm School of Economics. From Stockholm I actually moved to the Centre at Lund, again as a post-doc, before taking a position as a lecturer at Aarhus University, Denmark, from 2013. Finally I re-joined the Centre as Associate Senior Lecturer in the autumn of 2016 and became a Senior Lecturer in the spring 2020.

My research interests are fairly broad, but the main focus would be the international relations of East Asia, in particular Japan and its relations with China and the United States. I have published articles, books, and book chapters on a variety of topics including regional territorial disputes, military bases, and US influence on Japanese policy-making. I am also interested in how international politics affects everyday life in a range of ways, from food consumption to the environment as well as rural policy and immigration.

I am currently working on a number of topics, including US-Japan alliance management, Japan-South Korea relations, and Covid nationalism in Japan and Sweden.