Dr Dorothy Finan

Profile

I teach and research about youth and the global cultural industries. I am interested in how cultural producers and consumers are connected beyond borders and media forms, and in how these different stakeholders imagine each other. I am especially interested in the digital dimensions of popular cultural industries, and of how young people participate in these industries. I do my best to teach these topics in a way that takes student voices into account.

I come from an area studies background, having studied undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Japan and East Asia. I thus have working proficiency in Japanese and am used to working in an interdisciplinary way. I also used to do some Japanese to English translation, still do literary translation as a hobby, and take an active interest in intercultural communication in teaching and research.

I am from Bradford in West Yorkshire, and am especially passionate about local widening participation work. As a doctoral student I worked hard to create and deliver taster activities for local Key Stage 3 and 4 pupils to raise aspirations, designing a course for university access charity The Brilliant Club, and worked as a volunteer tutor for The Access Project. This has led me to my current role as PCI’s first Widening Participation Lead.

Responsibilities

• Academic Personal Tutoring Lead
• Widening Participation Lead

Research interests

My current research projects relate to scoping and improving measures to safeguard young people in the entertainment industries in the UK in Japan, such as background checks and chaperoning. I am also researching creative work and its representation in Japan’s virtual YouTuber (VTuber) industries.

My doctoral research focused on youth in Japan’s biggest-seeling genre of popular music, idol music, and used a webscraped corpus of lyrics, interviews with working lyricists, and transmedia histories to think about why stylised images of youth are so prevalent in Japanese popular cultural industries, and what this can tell us about contemporary Japan.

I have published peer-reviewed journal articles on the “global” branding of East Asian popular music industries and on player interaction with images of female adolescence in Japanese mobile games. I have a book chapter on “divas” in Japanese popular music, and upcoming publications related to barriers to child safeguarding in Japans’ entertainment industries.

Qualifications

• PhD in East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield
• MA in Contemporary Japan, University of Sheffield
• BA in Oriental Studies (Japanese), University of Oxford
• Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)

Professional memberships

• British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS)
• British Association of Japanese Studies (BAJS)
• International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM)

Student education

I teach on undergraduate and taught postgraduate modules relating to global cultural industries.