John Kupchik received his BA in Japanese Language from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in 2002, and went on to complete his MA in Linguistics (2004) and PhD in Linguistics (2011) at the same university. After this he was awarded a JSPS postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Linguistics at Kyoto University (2011-2013). He worked as a core member of the European Research Council (ERC) Project "Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages" (in charge of the Northern Ryukyuan and Muromachi-period Japanese entries) from 2019 until the termination of the project in May 2022.

Areas of Expertise:

• Old Japanese (8th century CE) poetry, linguistics and dialectology
• The Man'yōshū (759 CE)
• Classical Japanese
• Old Ryukyuan (16th-17th century CE) poetry and linguistics
• Historical linguistics
• Phonology
• Morphology
• Philology
• Japanese palaeography
• Japonic etymologies and reconstruction
• Minority languages in Japan (Okinawan, Hachijō, Ainu, etc.)