Professor Karen A. Shire

Karen A. Shire studied Sociology, Political Science and History at Boston College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she obtained her PhD in Sociology in 1989. From 1990 to 1999, she was initially Assistant Professor and later on Associate Professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. From 1999 to 2004 Shire was a professor of sociology and Japanese studies at the British Gerhard Mercator University in Duisburg and from 2004 to 2005 a professor at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Since 2005, she has been Professor of Sociology with a focus on Comparative Sociology and Japanese Society at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

In addition, Karen A. Shire is director of the Institute of East Asian Studies and director of the Essen College for Gender Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She is also a faculty member of the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy, a doctoral program that is offered jointly by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, the University of Cologne’s Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences, and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Her core areas of research include economic sociology, social Institutionalism, transformation of labour and employment, sociology of labour markets, transformation of gender relations, and interregional comparison of economy- and labour-related transnationalisation processes in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.