Rebekah Clements is an ICREA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She completed degrees in law and Asian studies at the Australian National University where she was awarded the University Medal, before obtaining an MA in classical Japanese literature from Waseda University in 2008. She completed her PhD in East Asian History from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) in 2012. Following her PhD she was a research associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, working on the Leverhulme-funded project "Translation and vernacularisation in pre-modern East Asia" (PI: P.Kornicki), and held a junior research fellowship from Queens' College from 2012-2015 where she completed her first monograph, A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2015). From 2015-2018 she held a lectureship and then an associate professorship (senior lectureship) at Durham University. She joined ICREA in October 2018.

Rebekah is a cultural historian of Japan, specializing in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). Her research draws upon textual and material-culture sources to examine the characteristics of Japanese early modernity as understood in the broader context of East Asia. She is currently working on a monograph about captured Korean potters who were taken to Japan and settled there at the end of the Imjin War of 1592-1598. This work takes place within her project that was funded by the European Research Council, “The Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592-1598” (2018-2024). The Aftermath project was a large scale attempt to understand the environmental, technological, and social legacy of the Imjin War, also known as Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s Invasions of Korea.