Name: Nagasawa (Surname), Eiji (Personal Name)
Date of Birth: April 28, 1953
Eiji Nagasawa has been Professor in the Department of West Asian Studies since 1998. He has been engaged in research of area studies of the Middle East, with a focus on Egypt, for nineteen years at the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE) successively after the graduation from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Tokyo in 1976. While working for IDE, he was dispatched to Cairo to conduct field studies: from 1981 to 1983. He moved to Institute of Oriental Culture in University of Tokyo as an associate Professor. He was the director of JSPS (Japan Society for Promotion of science) Research Center in Cairo from April 1998 to March 1999.
The subjects he took in such area studies can be classified into different research fields as follows. The first research field that he has been engaged in from the beginning is the socio-economic history. In this field, he studied on the rural migrant workers and the cotton economy in modern Egypt, the relation between the debate on Egyptian capitalism and communist movement, and the transformation of irrigation system in modern Egypt. The second field is the labor economic studies. He made researches on themes of the effect of labor migration to employment conditions rural Egypt in the late of 1970’s and the structure of international labor market in the Middle East oil producing countries. And the third is sociological studies of contemporary Egyptian society, his being interested in family relationships in Egypt, power structure of Egyptian villages, and the social solidarity in urban informal sector. The fourth field, which he has just begun to study in recent years, is the study of contemporary Arab thought, focusing on the attitude of Arab intellectuals to the popular thought heritage.