Congratulations to Professor Kris Kersey for receiving the Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research from the Medieval Academy of America!
Professor Kersey’s first book, “Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity,” was selected as a recipient of the prestigious 2025 Publication Prizes.
Facing Images is grounded in a close analysis of diverse sources from the Buddhist context of long-twelfth-century (late Heian)
Japan, including paintings, meditation manuals, sculptures, soteriological and philosophical writings, scrolls, reliquaries, prosthetics, and icons. The vast majority of the sources Kersey highlights fall outside the current canon of Japanese art history, and are generally little known and understudied outside of Japan, including the Eyeless Sutras (Menashikyō), The Significance of the Character “A” (Ajigi), and the Nishi-Honganji recension of the Anthology of the Thirty-Six Poets (Nishi-Honganji-bon Sanjūrokuninkashū). The author utilizes traditional medieval studies methods, such as paleography and translation; in fact, the book includes a translation of a medieval manuscript concerning visualization and bodily interiority. He also uses contemporary tools such as laparoscopy and radiography. Ultimately, Kersey places all the examined objects securely in their historical context, and reveals the anatomical and phenomenological contours of late Heian Japanese Buddhist optics as pan-sensorial, visceral, material, embodied, and somatically mediated through the heart-mind (the organ, in East Asian anatomy, that contained the mental faculties). This does not mean that Kersey reduces twelfth-century Japanese visuality to a singular way of seeing; instead, he argues that the medieval Japanese agents who produced the artifacts under consideration were in possession of a multifarious visual literacy.
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