Julie Valk is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King's Business School. Julie working with Professor Alexandru Preda and Dr Ruowen Xu on the ESRC project ‘Professional Hybridisations and Epistemic Practices of Cryptocapital: An Ethnographic Investigation of Cryptoasset Firms’.

Prior to joining King’s College London, she was an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at University College London (2019-2020) and a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Japan at Oxford Brookes University (2018-2019). She obtained her DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2018.

Julie is a social anthropologist by training, with research interests related to niche markets, retail and professional expertise. Julie has produced a substantial body of work on the specialised retail industry of kimono production in Japan. Julie has lived for several years in Japan and she has a long-standing research interest in Japanese society and culture.

Personal Website

Selected Publications

Forthcoming in 2021. Selling the Kimono: an Ethnography of Crisis, Creativity and Hope – Routledge ‘Advances in Ethnography’ series

2020. ‘The Alienating Inalienable: Rethinking Inalienable Wealth through Japan’s “Sleeping Kimono”’ in HAU: the Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (1): 147–165

2020. ‘The smell of Shōwa: time, materiality and regimes of value in Japan’s second-hand kimono industry’ in Journal of Material Culture 25(2): 240–256

2018. ‘From Duty to Fashion: The Changing Role of the Kimono in the Twenty-First Century’ in Fashion Theory 22(3): 309-340

2015. ‘The “Kimono Wednesday” Protests: Identity Politics and How the Kimono Became More Than Japanese’ in Asian Ethnology 74(2): 379–399 (2015