Kristopher W. Kersey

Kristopher W. Kersey’s research focuses on the intersecting histories of Japanese art, design, and aesthetics. He currently serves as Interim Associate Director of the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies and Director of Financial Aid for the Department of Art History.

His first book Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity (Penn State University Press, 2024) models a new paradigm for the study of art history, one that moves beyond reductive West/rest and modern/pre-modern frameworks. He is currently at work on two further monographs. The first, “Art as Metabolism: Fragmentation, Decay, and Assemblage,” discusses the nature of creativity, cultural heritage, and archival survival; the second, “The Discipline of Vision: Language and the Diversity of Sight,” interrogates the ways in which language inflects aesthetic experience. Shorter essays address an array of topics: the encounter with Europe ca. 1600 CE, the trope of impermanence, death and Buddhist manuscript culture, theory and historiography, and the archival anxieties in the Anthropocene.

In the summer term of 2025, he will serve as Ishibashi Visiting Professor at the Institute of East Asian Art History at Heidelberg University.

His work has been supported by a variety of fellowships and grants: an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), a Getty Scholar fellowship at the Getty Research Institute, an Anne van Biema Fellowship at the National Museum of Asian Art, and a postdoctoral fellowship from the European Research Council (with Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art at the University of Bern). He is currently a member of Afro–Eurasian Origins of Print: A Material, Social, and Theoretical History (a travel seminar organized by the Clark Art Institute).

In 2023–24, he held the William Andrews Clark Professorship at the UCLA Center for 17th– & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. In this capacity, he organized the core program Open Edo: Diverse, Ecological, and Global Perspectives on Japanese Art, 1603–1868. The program entailed three conferences, which respectively addressed transculturality in early modern Japan, environmental and eco-critical art history, and Ryukyuan and Ainu art. An edited volume is underway.

He is a member of the First-Generation Faculty Initiative and is on the advisory boards for the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, the Center for 17th– and 18th-Century Studies, and the Center for Buddhist Studies. He is also an affiliated faculty member with Global Antiquity.

Prospective Graduate Students:

I am open to advising innovative and dynamic students working in all periods (ancient to contemporary) of Japanese art history, very broadly conceived. If interested in the program, feel free to email me directly.