Dr Ekaterina Hertog, DPhil, MSc (University of Oxford), MA (Moscow State University) has been appointed to the Governing Body as Career Development Fellow in the Sociology of Japan. She earned her doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she studied in the Department of Sociology. Before coming to St Antony’s she was a Junior Research Fellow in Japanese Studies at Wadham College (2005-2008). Her research interests lie in the field of Sociology of the Family. She has recently completed a research project on Japanese unwed mothers, and the resulting book manuscript Tough Choices: Bearing an Illegitimate Child in Contemporary Japan is coming out with Stanford University Press. She has now started work on a new research project which aims to (i) examine how preferences and opportunities affect the selection of long-term mates; (ii) test some of the predictions that various theories make in this regard; and (iii) test some of the theories on the strategies that people employ to signal their qualities in order to attract the best possible mate and to avoid being deceived by potential partners who misrepresent their attractiveness. To do this she is using a dataset that documents the features and behaviour of 61,891 Japanese clients of a marriage agency over one year.

Research Interests: Sociology of the Family, Human Mate Selection, Contemporary Japanese Society, Reproductive choices, Never Married Mothers, Social Norms.

For further details see: http://www.nissan.ox.ac.uk/staff_a-z_directory/staff-japan/ekorobtseva and http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/people/hertog.asp.