Laurence's research interests began in early Japanese liturgical and poetic texts from the Old Japanese (8th Century, Nara) Period. Since then, his interests have developed to span a broader range across both time and space, but retain a focus on the relationships between form and meaning, particularly in highly oral genres. His most recent publications and projects scope across a wide variety of topics in language, including language education, multimodality and poetic rhetoric in Japonic languages. He also collaborates with researchers in experimental linguistics to investigate the cognitive underpinnings of poetic appreciation (and other topics) in a variety of languages, including Japanese, Korean, Welsh, English and Mongolian.
Research group membership
Associate Faculty Member, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.
Founding Member, ERP Studies for East Asian Languages (with Seoul National, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, University of Inner Mongolia and others).
Research grants and awards
John Fell OUP Research Fund, March 2019
Creative Multilingualism Funded Research Project, June 2018
British Association of Japanese Studies John Crump Studentship, 2016
Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities 2012-15
Young Bin Min-KF Fund Grant, 2014
University of Oxford Gibbs Prize 2008
Research projects
Poetry, song, heritage: the Poetic Mind (PI) 2019-2020, John Fell Fund
Can the music of poetry transcend cultural and linguistic barriers? A cognitive neuroscience investigation (Co-I) 2018-2019, Creative Multilingualism