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 a masters 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 Leverhulme-funded research associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, and held a junior research fellowship from Queens' College from 2012-2015. From 2015-2018 she held a lectureship and then an associate professorship (senior lectureship) at Durham University. She joined ICREA in October 2018.
Research interests
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 Asian and world history. Between 2018 and 2024, she was the Principal Investigator of the award-winning European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, "The Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592-1598" (2018-2024), which examined the environmental, technological, and social legacy of the Imjin War. In 2025, she won another round of funding and her new project, "Early Modernity, Popular Culture and the Natural World in Japan, 1600-1900," supported by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, will start on 1 June 2026.
Selected publications
- Clements R 2025, (ed.), A Cultural History of Translation in the Construction of the Global World. London: Bloomsbury Academic, vol. 4
- Clements R 2025, "Introduction" in Rebekah Clements (ed.), A Cultural History of Translation in the Construction of the Global World. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp.1-18.
- Clements R 2025, 'Korea in Japan," in Eugene Y Park, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Early Modern Korea. London: Routledge.
Selected research activities
During 2025, graduate students co-supervised by Rebekah as part of her "Aftermath" ERC project received the following dissertation prizes:
- Jaime Gonzalez, was awarded a national dissertation prize from the Spanish Association for Asian Studies (Asociación Española de Estudios de Asia Oriental) and also received an Extraordinary Dissertation Prize from the Autonomous University of Barcelona for his PhD dissertation "La gran guerra del Asia Oriental (1592-1598) a través de las fuentes misoneras."
- Baihui Duan was awarded an Extraordinary Dissertation Prize from the Autonomous University of Barcelona for her PhD dissertation "Managing Epidemics in Post-Imjin Korea: War, Environment, Infectious Diseases, and Medicine, 1576-1720."
- Raúl Cervera was awarded a national dissertation prize from the Spanish Association for Asian Studies for his masters dissertation, "Crónicas Kirishitan: Sobre Sekigahara (1600): La llegada de Tokugawa Ieyasu al poder en el crepúsculo del periodo Azuchi-Momoyama (1573-1603)."