Tomoko Okagaki is Professor of Political Science at Dokkyo University in Japan, where she also serves as the Chair of the Department of International Legal Studies as well as the Chair of the Department of Policy Studies in the Faculty of Law. She holds a doctoral degree in political science from the University of Michigan. She has also studied at Sophia University, the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, the University of Tokyo, and the University of Hong Kong.
Okagaki’s research career began in 1997 when she joined the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS), a think tank affiliated with the Japanese Ministry of Defense, where she served as a senior research fellow at the Research Department and as a joint research coordinator at the Planning and Coordination Office. While at NIDS, she also taught international politics part-time at Meiji University.
She held an Abe Fellowship from 2008-2010, spending two years as an academic associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and as a visiting scholar at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, both at Harvard University. From 2014 to 2015, she had her teaching engagement with le Départment de Géographie, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne as a professeure invitée and with L’institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, where she taught Asian regionalism in comparative perspectives with that of Europe.