Assistant Professor Osamu Maeda has been dispatched to Institute of Archaeology at University College London (UCL) since November 2014. We would like to introduce his research progress at UCL as of December 2015.
I have been working on joint-research with Professor Dorian Fuller, a specialist of Plant Archaeology at UCL since November 2014. We have completed the first step of the research and now I am back to Japan to extend my visa. From February 2016 I will be launching another joint-research at The University of Manchester. Until then I will be continuing my research at University of Tsukuba for three months.
I have posted the paper as a joint work with Professor Fuller and now it is under peer reviewing. We are also preparing for another joint-work research to follow up with the former paper and are planning to write three disquisitions as our joint-papers. In October, I held a lecture at Institut für Orientalische und Europäische Archäologie (OREA), one of the organizations in Austrian Academy of Science in Vienna. There I had a chance to talk to Barbara Horejsi, the chairman of the research center about the future plan of our joint-research project. Furthermore, another joint-research with Roger Mathew is in progress. I map out my strategy to work on various and several joint-works at the same time.
Nowadays in England colleges performance measurement in humanities and social sciences field got much severer too. Researchers are expected to work efficiently on researches whose results can be evaluated numerically. Although there are not a few criticisms that excessive emphasis on scholarly performance may lead out of original academic significance, it is global tendency that evaluation of researches will directly influence on the budget of universities and human resources so it is difficult to go against it. In these circumstances, individual researchers are asked to make progress in numerical evaluative results as well as in the original area of each one’s research, whether in humanity or in science. I have realized that making international joint-research network would be effective, and this would be possible by considering actual writing of papers with researchers in other countries, not just research collaboration. A research in field of humanities does not required to be stick to a laboratory so I look into the future that joining several research groups and working internationally as well as in the interdisciplinary field would find the future way out in the researches of humanities.