FACULTY PROFILES

BIOGRAPHY

Kristopher Kersey’s research focuses on the intersecting histories of Japanese art, design, and aesthetics. His work spans the premodern and modern eras, including both secular and Buddhist materials. His most prominent current research project, tentatively titled Art as Metabolism: Fragmentation, Decay, and Assemblage in the Arts of Japan, is a monograph that proposes a new framework for the history of art by foregrounding processes of fragmentation, decay, and assemblage. He is also at work on a smaller monograph on the role of philology in decolonizing art history.

His first book, Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity (in production, Penn State University Press), sets forth a critique of global modernity by focusing on issues such as montage, interface theory, physiology, and semiotics in the secular and Buddhist manuscripts of twelfth-century Japan. Various articles and chapters concern theory and historiography, the encounter with Europe ca. 1600, the modern trope of impermanence, death and manuscript culture ca. 1200, the figural aspects of poetic language, and the archival anxieties of the Anthropocene.

During 2023–2024, he will hold the William Andrews Clark Professorship at the UCLA Center for 17^th– & 18^th-Century Studies to direct Open Edo: Diverse, Ecological, and Global Perspectives on Japanese Art, 1603–1868, a year-long core program entailing three conferences. The goal of Open Edo is to reframe early modern Japanese art outside the tropes of the floating world and isolation by foregrounding diversity and eco-criticism. An edited volume is to follow.

His work has been supported by a variety of fellowships including the International Fellowship Program of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (2022), a Getty Scholar residential fellowship at the Getty Research Institute (2021), a postdoctoral fellowship from the European Research Council with Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art at the University of Bern (2019), the Anne van Biema Fellowship (postdoctoral) at the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution (2014–15), and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (predoctoral) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (2012–2014).

At UCLA, he has taught seminars on time and narrative theory, print media in imperial Japan (1910–1945), fragmentation and decay, and medieval pictorial scrolls (emaki). In addition to a biannual survey, recurring lecture courses address gender in Japanese art, the history of print in Japan (8^th c. to present), and modern and contemporary Japanese art (ca. 1850–present). 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 17^th– and 18^th-Century Studies, and the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. Outside the university, he serves as Secretary (2021–2024) to the Japan Art History Forum.

Within the Department of Art History, he serves as Director of Financial Aid for the 2023–2024 academic year.

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

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

• Review of Love, Fight, Feast: The Multifaceted World of Japanese Narrative Art, edited by Khanh Trinh. 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual 3, no. 4 (2022), 923–928.
•  “The Early Modern Fold: Pleated Media in Japan’s Encounter with Europe,” in Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period, edited by Bronwen Wilson and Angel Vanhaelen, 25–57. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022.
• “Impermanence, Futurity, and Loss in Twelfth-Century Japan,” in Destroyed – Disappeared – Lost – Never Were, edited by Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler, 87–99. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022.
• “The Classical as Critique in Japanese Art History.” In 造形のポエティカ：日本美術史を巡る新たな地平 The Poetics of Form: New Horizons in Japanese Art History, 1005–1027. Tokyo: Seikansha, 2021.
• “The Afterlife of the Western Canon: Archive and Eschatology in Contemporary Japan.” The Art Bulletin 102, no. 4 (December 2020): 121–145.
• “The Mediation of Death and the Temporality of the Scroll (Japan, c.1200 CE).” In The Continuous Page: Scrolls and Scrolling from Papyrus to Hypertext, edited by Jack Hartnell, 123–139. London: Courtauld Books Online, 2020.
• “Dynamism, Liquidity, and Crystallization in the Discourse of Japanese Art History.” In Einfluss, Strömung, Quelle: Aquatische Metaphern der Kunstgeschichte, edited by Ulrich Pfisterer and Christine Tauber, 287–310. Image 138. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018.
• “In Defiance of Collage: Assembling Modernity ca. 1112 CE.” Archives of Asian Art 68 no. 1 (April 2018): 1–32.