After serving as a
Junior Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Studies (1987–1990), he moved to the United States where he held positions as assistant professor of Japanese at the
University of Michigan (1990–1994), assistant professor at
Miami University (1994–1995), and assistant, associate, and full professor at the
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1995–2014). He was visiting professor at the
International Research Center for Japanese Studies,
Kyoto from 2001 to 2002 and again in 2008, a visiting professor at the
Ruhr University Bochum, Germany (2008–2009), and a visiting professor at the
National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tokyo, Japan from May to August 2012. In 2014, Vovin accepted the position of Director of Studies at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO) unit of the
EHESS, where he remained until his death in 2022. Vovin specialized in Japanese historical linguistics (with emphasis on
etymology,
morphology, and
phonology), and Japanese philology of the
Nara period (710–792), and to a lesser extent of the
Heian period (792–1192). His last project before his death involved the complete academic translation into English of the
Man'yōshū (ca. 759), the earliest and the largest premodern
Japanese poetic anthology, alongside the critical edition of the original text and commentaries. He also researched the moribund
Ainu language in northern Japan, and worked on
Inner Asian languages and
Kra–Dai languages, especially those preserved only in Chinese transcription, as well as on
Old and
Middle Korean texts. He had been engaged in coordinating the
Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages from 2019 to the time of his death in 2022, with cooperation from several universities and European Union funding of €2,470,200,00. However, the project was terminated upon his death. ==Personal life==