Professor Midori Yamaguchi

Midori Yamaguchi is a professor at the Department of Sociology, Daito Bunka University, Tokyo.

She specialises in gender history. Yamaguchi has researched the Victorian Anglican Church from a gender perspective. Her monograph, Daughters of the Anglican Clergy: Religion, Gender and Identity in Victorian England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which developed from her doctoral thesis at the University of Essex (2001), examined the nineteenth-century parsonage as a religious family enterprise. It explored both the impact of changes in the Established Church in the age of secularisation on the lives of clergymen’s daughters, and the impact of concern for their futures on the Church’s changing attitudes to women’s concerns.

Her most recent co-edited work was published in 2023 as ‘Akogare’ and the New Woman: Gender and Emotion in Modern Asia (Sakuhin-sha). It aimed to establish dialogues on the comparative history of emotions by examining the powerful desires, disruptions and repressions that accompanied the emergence of ‘new women’ across cultures.

Yamaguchi has led an interdepartmental research team for the centenary of Daito Bunka University in 2023, organising two symposia to discuss ’empire’ with a focus on gender and the body. She is now preparing a collection of papers from these symposia.

Her research in 2025 will include writing her second monograph for publication in Japan. This monograph will examine the lives of both daughters and sons of the clergy, and aims to demonstrate the intertwined influence of the transformation of the Established Church of England into an ‘Imperial’ Church, alongside the increasingly secularised society of nineteenth-century England. She is eager to gain new insights and ideas within the academic environment of Cambridge University, which will further her research endeavours.