Alexander Vovin

Alexander Vladimirovich Vovin (Russian: Александр Владимирович Вовин, born 1961 in Saint Petersburg, Russia) is a Russian-American linguist and philologist, currently directeur d'études in School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)) in Paris, France.

Alexander Vovin earned his M.A. in structural and applied linguistics from the Saint Petersburg State University in 1983, and his Ph.D. in historical Japanese linguistics and premodern Japanese literature from the same university in 1987, with a doctoral dissertation on the Hamamatsu Chūnagon Monogatari (ca. 1056). After serving as a Junior Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Studies (1987–1990), Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan (1990–1994), Miami University (1994–1995), and Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Hawai’i (1995–2003), he became the full professor at the same university and continued working there until 2014. He has also been a visiting professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto (2001–2002, 2008), a visiting professor at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany (2008–2009), and a visiting professor at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tokyo, Japan in May-August 2012.