Haru Yamada

Haru Yamada is a PhD sociolinguistics researcher, writer, and leading authority on the subject of listening.

Haru first introduced the idea of speaker- and listener-led conversations in her first academic publication, American and Japanese Business Discourse. Developing her concept of listener-led conversations in a publication with Oxford University Press, she went on to publish Different Games, Different Rules with a foreword by New York Times best-selling author Deborah Tannen. Her pioneering analyses of conversations has since led to international publications and journals used as staple textbooks in universities across the world, and her articles are regularly cited in academic work.

An experienced speaker at academic conferences, Haru’s paper on listener-led conversations won the Best Paper Award at the Tricontinental Global Advances in Business and Communication Conferences at Eastern Michigan University and at Universiteit Antwerpen in Belgium. Her transatlantic teaching experience includes The University of Arizona, University of Westminster, Imperial College, Boston University Global Programs and Richmond University. She also extends her mentoring services to her alma maters at Georgetown University, the international network of schools at the United World Colleges, and the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in London. Beyond this, she is a keen volunteer at the Chelsea Westminster Hospital and a competitive tennis player, having recently played a nervy match against former Prime Minister David Cameron under the watchful eye of her French family, who still suffer from post-Brexit regret.

Haru’s life mission is to champion listening, to make listening a thoughtful part of everyday practice. To achieve this end, she practices listening every day, drawing from skills she acquired from over seven international moves before attending university, and even more as a working adult. She currently lives in London with her French partner, two multilingual, biracial, multicultural children in a hybrid working, bigenerational home governed by an old Bengal cat. Listening is key.