BA (Hons) Theology and Religious Studies (Cambridge), Monbusho Postgradute Scholar Sociology (Tokyo), Grad.Dip Japanese Language (Sheffield), PhD Japanese Studies (Hong Kong)
(Deceased), 2020-11-18
History, Heritage And Archaeology
2019
Mark is a sociologist and cultural historian of Japan specialising in the history of sexuality, gender theory and new media. His recent publications have focused on the postwar history of Japanese cultures of sexuality and the development of the Internet in Japan, especially the use of the Internet and other new media by minority communities in Japan and throughout Asia.
Mark has held teaching and research positions in Australia, Japan and the U.S. where he was the 2007/08 Toyota Visiting Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan. His pioneering work on the history of sexual minority cultures in Japan has been the topic of invited presentations at universities in the U.S., the U.K., Singapore, Canada, Australia and Japan.
Sexuality and Social Transformation in Japan is an ongoing research interest that considers how global movements of people and knowledge are impacting upon Japanese constructs of sexuality and gender. Major publications from this project include the book Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age, described in the Journal of the History of Sexuality as "a richly detailed history of sexual subcultures in postwar Japan . . . even in Japanese there is no work with a comparable scope or depth of analysis". This was followed by Love, Sex and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation, described in The Journal of the History of Sexuality as "mak[ing] available to the general reader the vast trove of source material on early postwar Japanese sexual culture". The latest output from this project is an essay on Japanese sexologist Takahashi Tetsu in the University of California Press collection A Global History of Sexual Science.
Mark is currently working on a follow-on volume to his book on sexuality during the American Occupation of Japan, provisionally entitled Liberal Sexology in Postwar Japan which focuses on discourses of sexuality developed in a range of coterie magazines published in Japan in the 1950s and 60s.
1. M. McLelland and G. Goggin, eds, The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories, Oxon: Routledge, 2017
2. M. McLeland (ed.), The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, Legal and Cultural Challenges to Japanese Popular Culture, Oxon: Routledge, 2017
3. M. McLelland and V. Mackie, (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia, Oxon: Routledge, 2015
4. M. McLelland, Love, Sex and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
5. M. McLelland, 'Takahashi Tetsu and the Impact of Popular Sexology in Early Post-War
Japan', in Veronica Fuechtner and Douglas Haynes (eds), Towards a Global History of Sexual
Science 1880-1960, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018, pp. 211-31