Alicia Volk
アリサ・ヴォルク
Professor of Japanese Art History, University of Maryland
art and empire, transnationalism, Cold War, communism, gender, race, world's fairs, postwar art, modern art, contemporary art, photography, prints, visual culture, painting, sculpture, avant-garde, World War II, social history of art, early modern art, nuclear issues
Japanese, French, English
Washington, DC , United States
My scholarship addresses a range of mediums and critical issues in Japanese art from the nineteenth century to the present, including its relationship to the arts of Europe, the United States, and Asia. I am deeply committed to the creation of more expansive and inclusive art histories. In my transnational research I analyze Japanese art on its own terms and challenge the assumptions and biases undergirding an art historical canon that places it at the margins.
My latest book, In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025), brings a novel critical perspective concerning empire to the study of Japanese art under the American occupation of Japan (1945-1952). Through the analysis of charismatic artworks in a range of mediums and political commitments, the book shows how the forgotten art of a country in the shadows of American empire variously accommodated and resisted the Cold War global realignment that followed on the heels of World War II.
My book In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art (University of California Press, 2010) places early twentieth-century Japanese painting in the framework of global modernism. It was awarded the inaugural Phillips Book Prize of the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art. My exhibition and catalog Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement (University of Washington Press, 2005) tells the story of the transformation of the print as a medium of cultural identity and exchange in the context of Japan's post-World War II rehabilitation and reentry into the world community of nations.
My other publications have treated such mediums as Japanese prints, screens (byôbu), sculpture, and illustrated books, and such topics as the avant-garde, race and gender, artistic activism, the art world, the geopolitical dimensions of Japanese self-representations at world's fairs, and contemporary art.
PhD, History of Art, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2005
- Associate Professor, University of Maryland, 2010-2022
- Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, 2006-2010
In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
“Art and Activism, circa 1950: Three Artworks, Two Exhibitions, and the Early Cold War Peace Movement,” Japan in the 1950s: Kaleidoscope of Cold War Culture (forthcoming)
“Art and Women’s Liberation in a Newly Democratic Japan, with a Focus on Migishi Setsuko and Akamatsu Toshiko,” US-Japan Women’s Journal: A Journal for the International Exchange of Gender Studies no. 57 (2020): 19-54
“Beauty and Violence, Art and War: Some Reflections on the Visual Cultures of Imperial Japan,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review no. 31 (July 2019): 231-243
“The Image of the Black in Japanese Art, 19th Century to the Present,” The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art, vol. 6 of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., The Image of the Black in Western Art (Harvard University Press, 2017): 341-374, 406-426
“From Soft Power to Hard Sell: Images of Japan at American Expositions, 1915-1965,” JapanAmerica: Points of Contact, 1876-1970 (Cornell University, 2016): 66-87
“Authority, Autonomy and the Early Taishô ‘Avant-garde’,” positions: asia critique 21 no. 2 (Spring 2013): 451-473
In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art (University of California Press, 2010)
“Screen Projections: Modern and Contemporary Byôbu,” Beyond Golden Clouds: Japanese Screens from the Art Institute of Chicago and the St. Louis Art Museum (Yale University Press and Art Institute of Chicago, 2009): 73-87
Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement, 1945-1970 (University of Washington Press and Milwaukee Art Museum, 2005)
Japan and Paris: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the Modern Era (University of Washington Press and Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2004), co-authored with Christine Guth and Emiko Yamanashi
“Yorozu Tetsugorô and Taishô-period Creative Prints: When the Japanese Print Became Avant-garde,” Impressions 26 (2004): 44-65
“Katsura Yuki and the Japanese Avant-garde,” Woman’s Art Journal 24, no. 2 (2003): 3-9
- Discovering Japan: How the Arts Shaped a Nation, University of Maryland, 2017-present
- Japanese Art after 1500, University of Maryland, 2011-present
- Japanese Art in the Twentieth Century: Empire, War and Occupation, University of Maryland, 2011-present
- Artistic Relations between Japan and the United States, 1850 to 1970, University of Maryland, 2011, 2015
- Avant-garde Art in Japan, University of Maryland, 2017
- Meiji’s Modernity: History and Transformation in the Japanese Visual Arts, University of Maryland, 2018
- The Japanese Diaspora in America: Art, Race, Incarceration, University of Maryland, 2020
- Art and the Cold War: The View from Japan, University of Maryland, 2020
- Art Worlds—in Empire, War, and Occupation, University of Maryland, 2022
- No More Hiroshimas! Art and the Atomic Bomb, University of Maryland, 2023
- Nihonga and Neo-Traditionalism: What is Japanese about Japanese Painting?, University of Maryland, 2024
- Revivals: Continuity and Change in the Japanese Visual Arts, University of Maryland, 2013
- Cherry Blossoms and Samurai: Japanese Art in America, University of Maryland, 2012
- Japanese Art since 1945: The Social Role of Art after World War II, University of Maryland, 2010,
- From Edo to Meiji: Rethinking the 19th Century in Japanese Visual Culture, University of Maryland, 2009
- The Visual Cultures of Edo Japan, University of Maryland, 2009
- Modern Art in Japan, University of Maryland, 2008
- Japan and the West in Japanese Art, 16th-21st centuries, University of Maryland, 2007
- Japanese Prints, Northwestern University, 2004
- Art of Asia: Cross-cultural Connections (prehistory to present), University of Maryland, 2010
- Suntory Foundation Support for Overseas Publication Grant, 2024
- The Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, Publication Support Award, 2024, 2009
- Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art Publication Grant, 2023
- Millard Meiss Publication Grant, College Art Association, 2023
- Ishibashi Foundation-The Japan Foundation Fellowship for Research on Japanese Art, 2021
- The Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the Northeast Area Council of the Association for Asian Studies, Research Travel to Japan Grant, 2021, 2012
- Fulbright Research Award, Council for International Exchange of Scholars (at Waseda University), 2009-2010
- J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art and Humanities, 2006-2007
- Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow, Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, 2005-2006
- University of Maryland Center for Historical Studies, Japan Research Award, 2005
- Association for Asian Studies
- College Art Association
- Modernist Studies Association
- Japanese Art History Forum
3/18/2025