Professor Roger Goodman CBE

BA Durh, MA DPhil Oxf

Professor Roger Goodman became the sixth Warden of St Antony’s College in October 2017 in succession to Professor Margaret Macmillan. His relationship with the College began in 1982 when he arrived to start his doctoral work in social anthropology. Between 1985-88, he held a Junior Research Fellowship at the College in Japanese Studies.

He taught for one year in Imperial College London’s Humanities Department before taking up a Readership in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex in1989. In 1993, he returned to Oxford to become the first Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of Japan with a Fellowship at St Antony’s. He succeeded to the Nissan Professorship of Modern Japanese Studies in 2003, which has also always been attached to the College, a position which he will continue to hold while Warden. In 2004, he was appointed as the inaugural Head of the new School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS). For the academic year 2006-7, he was Acting Warden at St Antony’s following the retirement of Sir Marrack Goulding. In 2008, he was appointed Head of the Social Sciences Division within the University of Oxford, a position which he held until becoming Warden at St Antony’s. He was elected a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences in 2013, was Chair of Academy’s Council between 2015-19 and has been President of the Academy since 2020. In 2024, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to Social Science.

Professor Goodman’s research is mainly on Japanese education and social policy. He has published three major monographs with Oxford University Press, Japan’s International Youth (1990), Children of the Japanese State (2000) and (with Jeremy Breaden) Family-Run Universities in Japan (2020), and has been the editor or co-editor of a further ten volumes. Most of his work is also available in Japanese editions. He has supervised almost forty doctoral theses, mainly on Japan, over the past 25 years on topics ranging from Shinto shrines to volleyball coaches, teacher unions to karaoke, hikikomori to firefighters.