Joyce Ackroyd

Joyce Irene Ackroyd (23 November 1918 – 30 August 1991) was an Australian academic, translator, author and editor. She was a scholar of Japanese language and literature.

Early life

Ackroyd was awarded a PhD in Japanese and Japanese Studies at Cambridge University in 1951. Her doctoral thesis investigated the political career and writings of the Edo period Confucianist Arai Hakuseki.

Career

Ackroyd served was a member of the faculty of the Australian National University in Canberra until the mid-1960s.

Ackroyd moved to Brisbane where she helped to develop the University of Queensland's School of Japanese during the 1970s and 1980s. She was influential in building the program into one of Australia's main centres for Japanese studies.

In 1969, she showed prescience when she introduced a course in standard Chinese, which was not then considered to be a priority language at Australian universities.

Ackroyd's studies of Hakuseki culminated in her translations of Oritaku Shiba no Ki, published in 1980 as Told Round a Brushwood Fire: The Autobiography of Arai Hakuseki, and the Tokushi Yoron, published as Lessons from history : the Tokushi yoron in 1982.