Tomoharu Hirota received his BA in English Linguistics and Literature from Kyoto University and his MA in English from UBC. He is currently completing his doctorate in UBC’s Department of English Language and Literatures.

Tomoharu’s research interests are in the history of English, particularly focusing on morphosyntactic variation and change in Late Modern and Present-Day English. His current PhD project combines corpus linguistic, variationist sociolinguistic, and grammaticalization approaches to examine the recent diachrony of future temporal reference in Victoria, BC, Canada.