Sayaka Tamiya

Education:

2013 M.A., International Law, Kobe University
2010 B.A., Law, Hokkaido University

Aspirations:

Following a ten-year career in university administration, I have begun my career as a URA (University Research Administrator) at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center (SRC).
As someone who has been in academia for the past ten years, my consciousness of “university” is inspired by comments made in a lecture on faculty, administrative staff, and governance at research universities by Mr. Richard Saller of Stanford University (Dean, School of Humanities & Sciences in 2017), who was invited to a forum while I was working at the National Institute for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement of Higher Education. The key points of Mr. Saller’s comments are as follows.
“In the first place, a university is an organization where the locations of knowledge and production are extremely decentralized, and the key to ensuring their quality is in any case the faculty. What universities have to perform due to the expectations placed on them by society grows from year to year, and complex university organizations require specialized administrative staff (one type of which is the URA) in each department to respond to that. Moreover, trust between the specialized administrative staff and faculty is important when aiming for operations that align with the faculty’s specializations and interests.”
URAs are a comparatively new post, and the roles expected of them vary greatly between institutions. Some recent discussions of the role of URAs even seem to expect URAs to lead university operations. Conversely, I believe that URAs can help produce steady development of the SRC through close cooperation with the professors, based on the “conservative view,” described by Saller above. I feel that establishing this form (close to the ideal form) would be a true blessing.
On the other hand, the world of Slavic-Eurasian studies is one that I have had no experience in and am coming into contact with for the first time. International law, my specialty during my master’s course, covers all of international society, a field both wider and narrower than my current environment, where I have contact with humanities and social science research in a wide range of fields related to the Slavic-Eurasian area. Therefore, keeping abreast of cutting-edge knowledge is a daily learning experience for me. I am sure I will grow more and more attached to my job in the future.

At SRC I am responsible for the following:

        ・Work related to publishing (editing Acta Slavica Iaponica, Slavic Studies, etc.)
　 　・Research activity support
　 　・Work related to publicity (issuing the Center News in Japanese and English)
　 　・Supporting foreign researchers
　 　・Support to further research strategies (gathering information to secure external funding and preparing research strategies)
　 　・Pre-award work (supporting the preparation of application documents)