Dr. Tina Burrett is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Sophia University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts, Tokyo. She completed a PhD on media freedom and political power in Putin’s Russia at Cambridge University and holds an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the same institution. Her research interests include political leadership, the political economy of the mass media, and democratic transition and reform, particularly in Britain, Russia and Japan. She also has a keen interest in parliamentary politics and has worked in legislatures in Britain, Canada, Japan and the EU.

Dr. Burrett is a former Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Temple University, Japan Campus (2010-2014) and was an International Research Fellow at Hosei University (2008-2009). She is author of the book Television and Presidential Power in Putin’s Russia (Routledge, 2010) and has also written on Russia’s relations with Japan, with regard to the territorial dispute over the Southern Kurils/Northern Territories. She is currently working on a book on Prime Ministerial Leadership in Britain and Japan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), with support from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and the Great British Sasakawa Foundation. Dr. Burrett recently completed a research project on media transition in Burma funded by a SEED Grant from Temple University, Philadelphia. She also publishes regularly in the British and Japanese media, with op-eds appearing in, among others, the Japan Times and New Internationalist.